Brought to You by Murder
by Antje
Summary: Months have flown by since Shawn's investigated anything more than a sock lost in the laundry. But enjoying his other talents, and keeping his and Lassie's house clean (for once) soon looses some appeal: An old mystery rises from the dust of Shawn's and Gus's childhood, reviving interest and curiosity. WIP. SS/CL. JO/BG.
1. Chapter 1

**Greetings**: Welcome to life after Psych, everybody!

**Notes**: Continued from Apply Liberally at Sunrise. You might like to read/skim that first. Mentions (and uses as part of the plot) the unfinished sequel to ALaS, The Vintage Crimes of Christopher Sly (as "the Hayworth case"). - I don't know how often I'll be able to work on this, but there's at least one more chapter and I have an idea how it's going to go. Comments keep me inspired. Follow the story if you'd like to know about its random updates! A link to chapter one story notes is in my profile. Thanks to all readers!

**Warnings**: Pretty much ignores show canon, especially after season four. (Some recent things may get a mention here and there.) Ignores show continuity, about as much as Psych ignored(!) its own continuity through the years.

**Pairings**: Shawn x Carlton (established); Juliet x Gus (established); Dobson x Dobson's Mike (oc).

-x-

_1987_…

It dawned on Shawn that he was getting older. For a while, he walked around with this burden of age sitting on his shoulders. His mother noticed his pompous strut. She asked him about it, just once; it was always funny to hear Shawn's unpredictable answers.

"I'm trying to respect myself, Mom."

Shawn usually said her name-noun like it was the epitome of important, the epitome of epitome, a fact in fact. If Maddie wasn't already chuckling, she would be in another second.

"Why the sudden burst of self-respect?"

Most eleven-year-old boys would cower at the idea of liking themselves to the point of admitting it aloud. For a blistering moment, Maddie worried that Shawn's ego might inflate a little _too _insupportably. Lord help Henry if it did!

"Well," Shawn shimmied into a chair at the table, eyeing a cookie in a plate and trying to decide what kind it was, "it's not so much self-respect as it is a kind of—of _awareness_."

Maddie folded the damp dishcloth into quarters, ignoring the tickling in the back of her throat. She coughed a little. An ant on the counter derailed her humor. "An awareness of what, Shawn? You're being cryptic. Is this about a girl?"

"Nah, no girls. I'm my own man."

"A boy at school?" Lord help Henry if it was!

Shawn just shot her a quizzical expression. After a nibble of cookie, a sip of milk, he thought he'd uncovered her motive. "Are you trying to distract me? You play with people's heads for a living."

"I don't—"

"That's what Dad says."

"Your father's not always right."

"Yeah, that's something you and I can definitely agree on! Want a cookie?" He offered her the third and final specimen of sugary goodness.

Maddie, unable to resist, and knowing he wouldn't want her around much longer—soon there'd be no lazy weekend afternoons, no snacks in the kitchen, no momentary appearances of the man Shawn would grow up to be. "Sure." She took a seat, the cookie, and made a motion as if to knock the two ends of their cookies together. "Cheers."

"Cheers!"

"Now are you going to tell me why you're prancing around like a little man?"

"Oh, see, I have this idea that the older I get the more I'm going to have to remember things. I mean—there's _so much _they make us remember at school. And Dad's always _testing _my memory, too! It's a lot of responsibility, trying to remember everything that everyone throws at me! So, I figure if I act like I'm responsible enough to handle it, then I'll _be _responsible enough to handle it." Feeling that he'd exposed too many of his feelings, and beginning to feel humiliated, Shawn brought the topic a slight curve. "I told this to Gus."

This had stopped being comical. "What'd Gus say?"

"He thought I was nuts. But his dad isn't trying to turn him into a walking, talking human eyeball, is he?"

"Probably not. Why do you think your father's doing this?"

"Because he wants me to be a cop."

"And you don't want to be a cop?"

He glared at her, bored-like. They'd talked about this _way _too many times to bear another repetition. "No. I want to work at the Noodle Factory. I told you this. You get to make cool piles of noodles, _and _you get to eat as many as you want."

"Life is more than making noodles."

"Life isn't much more than that, though, making noodles and eating them."

Shawn had her there. "Sure you don't want to be a cop? You'd be good at it. You might like it."

"Ugh, no. No, I wouldn't like it. For one thing, that _uniform_. And it's made of polyester. Do you _know _what happens to polyester when it comes in contact with fire? It _melts_. It _melts _on your _skin_. It _sticks _to your skin. That is so gross."

Maddie scooped crumbs off the vinyl tablecloth. "Did your father tell you that?"

"Dad? No. I read about it," he said, as if saying he didn't know how else he gathered information. "Besides, he's been wearing suits since he was promoted, so I don't think that he thinks about it all that much anymore. I don't like the uniforms."

"I gathered."

"But I will say that they tend to cling correctly to the right curves of the right kind of people."

"Shawn!" But Maddie was unable to hold in a loud laugh. Shawn was pleased. He'd hardly heard her laugh like that in months, at least not when he was around and certainly not because he'd said something that'd humored her. When she'd recovered, she attempted reprimand. "You should say things like that."

"Why not? It's true."

"Well, your dad might be teaching you how to observe everything in a room and how to solve this or that case, but he's not doing a good job teaching you when to keep your thoughts to yourself."

"That's true. I won't deny it. Mom, is this _ever _going to stop? When's he going to give up?"

"Your father, give up? Oh, no, Goose, he doesn't give up."

"I was afraid you'd say that."

The slapping of feet on the front porch was soon followed by the smacking of the screen door. "Shawn?"

"In here, Gus!"

Maddie continued to have a difficult time shooing Shawn's misappropriate observation out of her mind, even as she handed a sweaty Gus a glass of ice water. She'd have to talk to Henry about that—the things he was teaching Shawn. Though beginning to feel her influence on Henry was waning, and still touched that Henry bothered to help rear Shawn after all the horror stories she'd heard from clients through the years—she had to try. She knew what Shawn was like when he grew bored. It'd happened to him in school recently, and she was afraid of what happened when Shawn's restlessness became more domestic. It wouldn't be pretty, and Henry wouldn't like it.

"There's a whole mess of cops down at the beach," Gus was announcing while Maddie thought and Shawn blew bubbles into his glass of milk. Shawn, too enraptured to continue, made a disgusted face at Gus.

"You actually came in here, said hi to us, and had a glass of water before you told us there were cops at the beach?"

"What? I was thirsty. It's hot out. And the humidity's low. I need to keep hydrated."

Shawn had no idea what to say to this. "Mom, can we—"

"Yes, but be careful. Stay out of the way. And take this to your father." She drew a paper sack out of the refrigerator. Left in Shawn's safe-keeping was taking a chance, but it was better than no chance at all. "He forgot to take it this morning."

"Ew, totally bogus tuna stink!"

"He likes tuna on Saturdays. Be home by five. I want to help you work on your science project while we're fixing dinner." If Henry was going to teach Shawn how to solve crimes, she was going to teach him how to boil pasta. It'd give him a head start at the Noodle Factory if nothing else.

"Will do!"

"Thanks for the water, Mrs. S! Bye!"

Gus left the emptied glass on the table, then darted after Shawn to the front lawn. Shawn's bike was there, with a basket on the front to cart interesting goodies around, sometimes found while they beach-combed, sometimes found in the schoolyard or scary alleys they dared one another to ride through—alone. Shawn asked him where the cops were, and Gus, already pedaling, said it was two blocks "that way."

Shawn had no trouble seeing it. Not far from the pier, and in front of some new beach-front construction of office buildings that always made Shawn roll his eyes. He hated it when land developers got what they wanted and ruined the nice view of his part of Santa Barbara. Pedestrians, seemingly hundreds of them at two o' clock on a Saturday, had flocked to the system of rails that surrounded the beach, and many more layers of surfers, roller skaters, cyclists, dog walkers, troubadours and what-have-you were crammed onto the beach, widened by low tide. Unafraid to leave their bikes unattended, they flopped them onto the ground next to the new construction. For good measure, Shawn kicked the edge of the building as he walked by.

"What'd you do that for?" Gus asked, wishing Shawn would hurry up. He didn't want to miss everything!

"I hate this building. It's stupid. I mean, if they're going to _build _something, why can't it be something cool like a Chuck E Cheese or a Baskin Robbins?"

"Yeah, that would be cool. What is it?" Gus took in as much of the buildings frame as he could. It was made of solid timber boards and not much else just yet.

"A dumb old office. A real estate agent or something. I want a Baskin Robbins!"

"There's one on the other side of town."

"Yeah, but it'd be cool to have one we could ride our bikes to. One of these days, I'm going to be rich enough to buy that building and burn it down. Hey, look, Dad's car! He's definitely here. And I have his stinky tuna sandwich." Shawn held up the sack for emphasis. It still stank, even when they were a stone's throw from the ocean. The ocean bored him, too. Like the sand, like the Santa Ynez mountains—it was just kind of there, year in and year out, season in and season out, always the same. Boring. He wanted to see something different for once. Maybe go back to his crazy uncle's place and shoot cans off the rail fence by the barn…

Through a series of "Excuse Us" and "Pardon Us" and such mumbles and pleas to get the spectators out of their way, Shawn and Gus swerved their way through tan bodies and fat bodies, long legs and short legs, stepped over small dogs and veered around large ones—who were more interested in the smelly sack than Shawn and Gus. Finally, they broke through the barrier and stood on sand, with a fine view of the teeming officers of the SBPD. They swarmed around like brown and blue bees. Shawn blinked, wrestling with sweat and hair clinging to his eyelashes. When he winced to deaden some of the July sunshine, he spotted his father standing with two other plain-clothes detectives and three uniforms. An important man took a long, final look at the ocean before meandering his way back to the men.

"Chief Wilkins," Gus said, spotting exactly who Shawn did. "Must be something big."

"I see Officer Grayson not far. I'll talk to her. She likes me."

"I'll wait here."

"Coward," Shawn teased, smiling.

He knew Gus liked Officer Grayson. She was pretty, had some serious curves that her uniform showed off, and one of the specimens that'd popped into his head when Shawn had mentioned it to his mom. Shawn left Gus to stew in his daydreams, wondering if his lack of fear facing the opposite sex meant there was some deformity in him. But, just standing at the threshold of puberty, he had a long way to go before everything was settled. Still, the sight of buxom Grayson was intriguing, about as intriguing as the well-sculpted derriere his eyes glazed across—and looked away with striking alacrity when realizing it was the bum of Officer Ortiz—a dude. Oh well, maybe he'd grow up to have a butt as muscled as that someday. But probably not, if genetics offered any foreshadowing.

He got the gist of the ordeal from Grayson. Fascinating it was, so much so that Shawn's hair along his forearms stood up, his skin popped out in gooseflesh. When he returned to Gus, the tale was at the tip of his tongue. But he didn't want everyone around them to overhear. He pulled Gus under the yellow tape, having the blessing of Grayson and another nearby officer. Special privileges! It was nice to be appreciated.

Shawn licked his lips before talking. "They found a body in a trunk. The trunk washed up on shore."

"A trunk?"

"Yeah, you know, like one of those humped-back sea chests we saw at your grandma's house that one time."

"Oh—oh that kind of trunk. Well, whose body was it?"

"They dunno. It was all gross inside, Grayson said. The trunk's old. Grayson said that the chief said that my dad said that he was surprised that the trunk had held together that long. They think it must've been dumped way out somewhere."

"That's crazy."

"I know. Creepy, too. Imagine being killed, murdered even—then thrown into a trunk and then thrown into the ocean. Sounds like something the Goonies would investigate. Wanna play? We can get Dennis and Morgan and—"

"Well, all right, but I'm not playing Chunk again."

"I make no promises."

"Aw, man! Come on, Shawn!"

"Let me just run this gross sandwich over to Dad. I think he's part porpoise, but I'm not really ready to align him with such a friendly species just yet. Be right back!"

As soon as Henry spotted his son parading across the sand, devil-may-care attitude wholly on display, Henry's systolic blood pressure rose by twelve points. "Shawn, what are you doing here?"

"I brought you your lunch. Or dinner. Your stinky fish thing Mom said you had to have."

Henry snatched at the sack. "So that's where it went!"

"It didn't _go _anywhere. It was always in the fridge. Grayson told me about the trunk." He could barely see the ancient thing, black and brown and cedar through the legs and around the bodies of five men. "Think it's old?"

"Yeah, and the body's old, too. And I'm going to have a long talk with Grayson."

"Don't do that. She's a good officer." And she's hot! But, wisely, he neglected to say that part out loud, even if his dad had agreed with him. Most warm-blooded men _would _agree with him. They'd probably agree with him, objectionably, about Officer Ortiz's chiseled and manly bum, too, and that made Shawn feel that his earlier and accidental ogling was normal. "You know she wouldn't do anything that'd hurt me. But Gus and I are going to go meet Dennis and Morgan and see if we can't solve this case on our own, Goonies style."

"Don't go out by the rocks again, Goonies or no Goonies. And be home by five. You need to finish your science project before Monday."

"Mom's given me this rigamarole already. Five. Science project. Got any more info about the trunk or the body in the trunk?"

"No," Henry said flatly, intensely. Then, he figured, why not? It wasn't likely they'd ever figure out where the dead person inside the trunk came from. Why not let Shawn have his chance? "Well, the trunk is old. Grayson's dad's an antique dealer. And Grayson thinks it might be from the early 1900's. The body's not in good shape. Mostly bones at this point. There's some liquid inside."

"That's from decomposition, right?"

"How'd you know that?"

"Stop the presses, Dad! I'm not an idiot! And the trunk's been sealed. It was dunked in wax or something. I can see it from here."

Henry scooped his palm over the top of Shawn's hair, a gesture of pride. "Just a paraffin wax, maybe. I don't know. You run along now and play. We'll deal with this. And don't make Gus be Chunk again!"

For a second, Henry watched Shawn's detachment from the beach with a pang of remorse and a twist of envy. He shouldn't have been so hard on Shawn through the years. He should've let him be what he was: a kid. The games had begun as a fun pastime, but somehow they'd become more like lessons than playful diversions. He sighed, lowering aviators back on his nose, and returned to the dead body in the old steamer trunk.

-x-

_1994_…

Despite embarrassments—and one really big ado four months ago—Shawn Spencer still considered the SBPD headquarters a home away from home. He could walk through it with his eyes closed. He could walk through it with his nose in the air and half his face turned from the oceanic blight he carried in a paper sack.

"Make way! Coming through! Keep the aisle clear! Smelly fish sandwich! Out of the way! That means you, Dobson!"

Shawn cooled, demeanor shifting, catching sight of the tall brunette babe Dobson was with.

"Hellooo, Dobson's friend."

He was glad neither Dobson nor Dobson's "friend" heard him, and everyone, including the chief, gave him a three-foot circumference. They knew it was Stinky Sack Saturday.

At last, Shawn drew to a halt, complete with braking sound effects, at his old man's desk. With grandness befitting his persona, Shawn set the sack down—right in the middle of Henry's stack of paperwork. Shawn hunted for every flicker of information he could, from the file folder to the people in the room, to the amount of coffee left in the pot on the snack counter. He noticed that the clock on the wall was two minutes fast, who was at his desk and who wasn't, what color of tie the chief wore and what color eyes Dobson's paramour had. Just in case his dad asked him something, although that had faded into the bygone days of glory the last six months.

"Stinky Sack Saturday," Shawn said, "as promised. You forgot your lunch again." Dad had forgotten a lot of things since Mom left. He couldn't think about that now, not the mismatched socks or laundry left in the washer for days until it stank. Until it smelled like tuna.

Henry aimed a glare at Shawn over his reading glasses. "You brought me my lunch?"

"As you see." Shawn refused to sweat or break his role. He was the suave and carefree character, free to do whatever the hell he wanted—just as soon as he found a way out of Santa Barbara.

"And that's the only reason for your visit?"

"I thought it was a pretty good reason, actually. You don't think so? Well, I can take the tuna fish sandwich away." Shawn's hand aimed for the sack, soon swiped away by Henry.

"I want the sandwich. I just thought—" Henry paused, reflecting. He couldn't tell if Shawn knew and that's why he'd brought the sandwich, or if Shawn hadn't heard and had brought the sandwich out of the goodness of his heart—and perhaps a chance to get some exercise and sunshine.

"Thought what?" Shawn waited, and, fed up with waiting, uncomfortable the longer his dad continued to scrutinize him, he gestured, palms open and jerking to the floor. "What, Dad, what? Thought what?"

"That you might've heard."

"_Aaaa_-bout—about what?" Shawn's lungs rapidly filled with cold police department air, and his carefree slack tightened as if ready for a hangman's noose. "Is it Mom? Is she—"

"Oh, no, nothing like that." Jeez, Shawn really hadn't heard. Sometimes the daisy-chain of weirdoes that outsourced department information managed to miss Shawn. Sometimes not. "I didn't mean to freak you out. Your mom's fine. She—"

The desk phone rang.

"I'd better take this, Shawn. I'm waiting for the Assistant DA to get back to me. Hang out for a second, though. I want to talk to you."

"Sure. I'll go down and get my digits inked. Been a while since I've done that. I want to see if any of those chemical burns freshman year changed my prints."

Not waiting for Henry's nod of approval, Shawn returned to the front of the building, just to turn left at the doors and descend into the abysmal lower-levels. It had a smell all its own, partly the soft heat of electronics, partly like the massive amounts of paper and cardboard in storage there, and partly something that carried the aroma of perpetually damp mop.

The booking officer on duty was none other than Officer Beanpole. At least, that's what Henry always called him, what Shawn called him in his mind. Lassiter cemented the belief that everyone should carry a descriptive name, not just a familial one. He was gangly, legs and arms nearly the same length, his neck thin and graceful like a swan's, and Shawn could've written odes to Lassiter's fingers. There was a disturbingly hygienic quality about Lassiter. Regardless of what he did, he was utterly spotless afterwards. He was one of the most difficult people to humanize; Shawn couldn't imagine him eating dinner let along screwing his wife, or whoever it was that'd put a ring on an important finger.

"Hi," Shawn said, laying his forearms on the high counter.

"What do you want?" Lassiter didn't look up from adding signatures to a fresh stack of fingerprints. More gang members. Would it never end? But he did glance at the punk kid in front of him, seventeen, eighteen, coarse brown hair bleached in strands by summer sun, though his face remained oddly free of sun's touch. "Oh, Henry Spencer's offspring. Did you get arrested again? Need your fingerprints taken?"

"I came for a double-fudge brownie sundae. Am I in the wrong place?" He'd do anything to get under Officer Beanpole's skin—and stay there. It didn't take much. Lassiter, regardless of what he might think, wore a whole lot of his heart on his navy blue polyester sleeve. Better that Lassiter was in that uniform than Shawn Spencer.

But Lassiter looked into the middle-distance at the mention of food. "God, that sounds so good right now." He came to his senses, the one that didn't have to do with hunger. "I missed lunch. What are you doing down here?"

"Waiting for my dad to get off the phone. He wants to talk to me about something,'n I dunno…"

Lassiter had one guess as to what that was, only he thought it best not to spill it. Detective Spencer wouldn't like it one bit, and he was an important person in the precinct. Unfortunately, Carlton couldn't decide if he _liked _Detective Spencer. He faced the same dilemma with Detective Spencer's kid. Thank goodness he didn't have to work with _two _Spencers. One was more than enough.

Shawn scared him to death with a single, ambiguous question.

"Is it true what they say about you?"

Playing it aloof, Lassiter responded with the first nonchalant sentence that came to mind. "Any number of things you hear about me _might _be true."

Shawn debated on whether or not he should go on with it, by asking if _all _those things were true. It was intriguing, nonetheless, having Lassiter admit that people talked about him. There was always scuttlebutt about the rookies and the almost-rookies. "Is it true that you're in a master's program while you're working full-time at this firetrap?"

"Oh, that."

Shawn wondered what other caverns of secrets and rumors it _could've _been. "Seriously, you've never been more appealing to me than you are right now." He was glad Beanpole ignored the comment—or flirtation—or, at this point, Shawn wasn't even sure. Maybe just a statement of stalwart curiosity. "So it is true?"

Lassiter took a second before nodding. "True. All of it. And, on top of that, being married is a whole lot of fun."

"Double-fudge brownie sundaes every night kind of fun, or mostly that she washes the dishes while you do your homework?"

"More of the latter than the former."

"I'm sorry to hear that."

"What do you _want, _Spencer? There are umpteen ways you can waste time in this building, and why are you wasting it down here?"

Shawn cut to another piece of gossip. "Who's the dude with Dobson? No, not fair, you can't look away and say you don't know when I know you know who I'm talking about!"

Lassiter reached his final sheet, sorry that he wouldn't have anything to excuse him from Shawn Spencer's presumptuous yet oddly friendly and conspiratorial presence. "His name's Mike. He's been here a few times. They go to lunch together. That's all I know."

"Sushi bar, or Dairy Queen?"

"I don't know! Sometimes they eat at the sushi bar, I guess, and sometimes they go to that weird place down by the quays—the Vine-something. I can't remember its name."

Shawn supposed Lassiter meant the Tanglevine Club, but didn't feel like prancing this knowledge. It was no fun playing brain games with Officer Beanpole. It wasn't as though extra knowledge of silly things would win him points, not like it did with Dad or Gus. "Sushi bar. Just as I suspected. They are lovers in the night! And sometimes daylight, too!"

"Eh—" Lassiter eked the surprised interjection from stunned vocal chords. "Will you go bother someone else for a change?"

Shawn was on the verge of retreat when his name was hollered from the stairwell. "Speak of the devil," he said to Lassiter, finding it was Dobson who came toward him.

"Your dad went to meet Mr. Grimes. He told me to tell you that he'd tell you what he wanted to tell you later." Dobson's eyes roamed about, deep in thought. He was a sweet-faced twenty-something with cedar hair that he wore too long over his ears. Shawn had discovered months ago that Dobson had trouble with his weight, judged by the wear around the holes of his belt. No wonder he and Mike were eating more sushi than Dairy Queen.

Shawn wasn't disappointed that his dad had gone off and left him—for the Assistant District Attorney. "That figures. Thanks, Dobs. Hey, wait." He called Dobson back. "Don't suppose you know what he wanted to tell me?"

Dobson shook his head, shrugged, glanced furtively at Lassiter before juggling farewells with Henry Spencer's only child.

Shawn combed a hand through his hair, then left his elbow again on Officer Beanpole's booking counter. True to his nature, Lassiter had out the bottle of blue cleaner and a paper towel, wiping off the surface to keep it dust-free. "It's amazing how you can't tell people are gay just by looking at them."

Lassiter aimed a stream of blue cleaning fluid at Spencer's fingers. Shawn jerked them away. "It's amazing that you can tell who's a smart-aleck punk just by looking at them."

"I was just making an observation. I have way more gay friends than I do, uh, not-gay friends."

"I don't doubt it," Lassiter uttered it as if it was a death sentence. "Now that you know your dad's abandoned you, either get your sad little-boy tears out now, Spencer, or get out of my sight." Lassiter helped Shawn make the right decision, grabbing him by the collar of his Oingo-Boingo t-shirt and urging him closer to the staircase. Shawn whacked at the inside of his arm, able to release himself. The next thing Lassiter knew, he was on the floor, blinking rapidly at the lights in the ceiling. "What the hell did you just do?"

"Magic skills," Shawn said, helping Beanpole to his feet. He brushed off the shoulders, the chest—and let his hands fall, starting to enjoy it a bit. "Sorry. Do you know what my dad wanted to tell me?"

It would be fun to tell Shawn. Fun, in the sense of the word that was absolute purity to Lassiter. He put his face close to Shawn's, grabbing fistfuls of t-shirt and leather-string necklaces. "If I tell you—you can't tell him I told you. Got that? It would mean my ass. But I do so want to see the look on your face." One hand came up, lightly smacking Spencer's cheek. "Promise not to tell your dad you heard it from me?"

"Jeez, what are we, in the fifth grade or something?"

Lassiter tightened his grip. "Promise?"

"Yeah, all right—dammit, I promise!" Because, by now, Shawn had to know what it was. But Lassiter hadn't moved yet, was still calculating his trustworthiness. "Unless you're going to slip me some tongue or spill some secrets, Beanpole, let me go."

Blue eyes all winced together, Lassiter tossed Spencer from him. "Come on." He swung a set of keys free from a uniform pocket, and paraded with a sultry, easy walk down the dark corridor. Shawn grew excited when Lassiter unlocked the door to the Unknown Room. For years, Shawn had entertained the idea that the Unknown Room housed the grandest amount of donuts, perhaps cooked fresh by an on-site baker, with coffee and snacks, strippers on Friday nights (this was a thought he had when slightly older), and huge televisions always tuned into ESPN.

He followed behind Beanpole and into the Unknown Room. "This is one of the greatest moment's of my life. I'm happy to share it with you, Carl."

"That's Carl_ton_, Spencer. Lassiter to you."

"_Officer_ Lassiter if I'm feeling aristocratic," Shawn conceded, gesticulating grandly, bowing just as grandly, before he examined the surroundings. He wasn't far off from _part _of his imaginings. There was no stripper's pole, not even a fireman's pole, and there was no baker on duty. But there was a television, and ESPN was on, and there was one carton of donuts left.

"Sweet, the Breezeway Bakery!" Shawn pounced on the sky-blue carton known to all in Santa Barbara as a symbol of quality and succulence. "Can I eat this?"

"Over here." Lassiter pinched Shawn's sleeve and hauled him to another door. After trying a couple of keys, Lassiter found the right one. The door swung out rather than in, an indicator that the room ahead was tiny.

It was about the size of the instant photo booth at the mall. It was a closet. It was a bathroom stall. Shawn couldn't tell what it was, but when Lassiter flicked on the bare bulb suspended from the ceiling by a risky-looking wire, he knew what he was looking at.

"There's _two _of them?"

Lassiter stood next to Shawn, now able to soak in the expression of surprise and intrigue. That's what he wanted to see: the real Shawn Spencer. "There's two of them."

Shawn glared at the steamer trunks, twins of one another right down to the corrosion of the brass handles and the presence of paraffin wax. "Two of them," he repeated, contemplating them while stroking his chin. "When'd you find the second one?"

"Around three this morning. It was found out by Golita. Unfortunately, it's not really ours: the sheriff's department has custody of it." Lassiter strolled around the table that held the two steamer trunks. "They don't have the room for it, and we _barely _have room for it, as you can see. We're going to keep it as long as we can."

"Was there a body inside?"

"Yeah. Too decomposed to do anything with it. Mostly goop when it was opened. Same as the other. _Buu-uuut_."

"Oh, I like that but. Hit me with it, Beanpole. But what?"

Lassiter's eyes shimmered, and his whole soul seemed to glow two times its regular size. "We found this!"

He shone his issued flashlight on a specific portion of Chest Number Two. Shawn raced to examine the spot. The wax had an incurvation akin to the shape of a human fingertip. The wax was compressed in a striped pattern, hardly discernible to Shawn's eyes. He shot up, matching excited gazes with Lassiter.

"A fingerprint!" they said at the same time, each whispering it with quelled passion.

Shawn was thrilled—and curious—and wondering why his dad wanted to tell him about the second trunk.

"But the first trunk never led anywhere. No one ever found out the deceased's identity."

"DNA evidence is going to change all of that, once the results come back in. Once they _do _come back in, we'll be able to know, at the very least, if it's male or female. That's more than we knew before."

"Yeah, I'll probably be old and gray when those results finally get here. Well," Shawn folded his arms over his middle, finding the room chilly and his enthusiasm for this ancient mystery not enough to keep him warm, "this is interesting, but I'd better go. If anyone found me in here—"

"Good point." Lassiter escorted Spencer from the Unknown Closet in the Unknown Room to the Unknown Room.

"We're under the video room upstairs, aren't we?" Shawn, head back to look at the ceiling, touched it with a flattened palm. "Just trying to get the layout of this place. I always knew there had to be another room down here."

"Take that donut, if you want it."

Shawn wasn't going to pass up a chance to snack on a Breezeway Bakery lusciousness. "Thanks." He binned the empty box and put most of the donut in his mouth. "Thanks for showing me the chests, too, even if it would've cost you some office cred."

"Not likely, not if your dad wanted you to know about them. He thought of you when we were ogling the two chests earlier."

"He did?" Shawn was so enthralled that his chewing slowed, and he forgot to watch Lassiter's magic fingers turn the key to lock the Unknown Room. "What'd he say?"

"Just that—you know—you were so excited about that first chest when it was found, he thought you'd like to know about the second one."

"That's true. I can't wait to tell him that I think there's probably a third one." Shawn finished off the donut—so good that his tastebuds were practically in orgasm—but Lassiter gave him a fixed eye. "What, and you think there isn't? Come on, things like that always come in threes. Like hexes. And hurricanes in Hartford and Hereford and Hampshire. Always in threes!"

This wasn't something Lassiter was ready to believe, thrilling as it _could _be. "I'm just telling you what your dad said. It's up to you to tell him anything else."

Beanpole was right about that. Shawn, momentarily weakened by the thought that his dad had considered him, even out loud and in front of his coworkers, even Lassiter, decided it was tit-for-tat to repeat what he'd heard his father say about Lassiter. "Dad thinks highly of you, too—or, you know, as highly as he ever thinks of anyone. He admires you. Thinks it takes a lot for a man to work full-time _and _be married _and _still go to school."

Returned to his bottle of blue cleaner, Lassiter found freedom from embarrassment in the cleanliness of the countertop. His cheeks burned, and the back of his neck throbbed. "It is hard," he said quietly, "and some days are better than others."

"What's are you in graduate school for, anyway?"

"Criminology."

"They have degrees in that now?"

"You'd be amazed."

"What's your minor?"

"A couple of things."

"How can you have more than one minor?"

"Easily. I like to learn."

"Well, so do I, but I'd rather be out in the real world gaining my knowledge and not having my brain sucked out by years and years of very expensive college. No, seriously, what's one of your minors?"

"History."

"What's the other?"

"I'm not telling."

"Is it something sissy, like poetry?"

"I'm not telling. And maybe it's time for you to go out in the real world, Spencer, and get some of that knowledge you're so hungry for. Don't let me stop you."

Squeeze, squeeze. Wipe, wipe.

Squeeze, squeeze. Wipe, wipe.

Wheeze, wheeze. Sigh, sigh.

Wheeze, wheeze. Sigh, sigh.

-x-

_2014_…

Shawn flung up his eyelids, aware of the world around him, the celery-hued walls of his and Lassie's bedroom, the mixture of sunlight and daylight filling it up. The noises that'd woken him from a combination of memories and dreams was nothing more than Lassie's wheezy early-morning breathing. A phenomenon that only occurred between the hours of five-thirty and seven, July through September. It was late August, the heart of Wheezy Lassie time.

Beneath the sheets, Shawn shimmied closer to Carlton. In a moment, Wheezy Lassie ceased and regular old Carlton found Shawn Spencer's head resting on his chest. Briefly, Carlton forgot what day it was—just another August day. But it raced to the forefront of his mind, past the fading images of weird dreams that, if he remembered, he'd tell to Shawn later and they'd laugh over them. He toyed with the tips of Shawn's out-of-control hair, always pleased to find a streak of gray among the thick heap of desert golds and earthy tones.

"Hi," he croaked the greeting. "Happy anniversary."

Shawn's mind worked a different way; he couldn't even repeat the phrase. He had that all figured out, anyway, saving it for later. From the top of his head, he grabbed Lassie's hand and cupped it around his. "Do you remember, a really long time ago, those steamer trunks that the SBPD and Sheriff's department confiscated? They had gross, watery dead bodies in them and were covered in wax."

Lassiter gaped at him, flicked at Shawn's bottom lip. "Honestly, how do you remember that? I mean, yeah, it was interesting and all. Part anthropology, part archeology, part forensics and a murder investigation—but how do you _remember _that?"

"I remember you showing me the second chest hours after it'd gotten to the precinct. Remember?"

"Vaguely. I remember a punk-ass kid who wouldn't leave me alone. Heh," Carlton chuckled, swabbed sleep from his eyes, "you were the first one who told me Dobson was gay."

"Who _told _you, but I think you had suspicions of your own. I was just the first loud-mouthed punk-ass that said everything that no one else would. And how _hot _was Officer Grayson? Seriously—that woman was smoking! The cause of all my wet dreams. Well, most of them. But-but-but, you remember those trunks, don't you, Lass?"

"Of course I do. Why were you thinking about them, now? What brought this on?"

Shawn didn't answer. He had a way of sidestepping questions he didn't want to answer, a lot more in the last eight months, too. "What happened to those things? And whatever happened to the case?"

"It got stuck in a box with all the other cases we couldn't solve. I came across it once. Let me see, when was that? More than a year ago now. I was going to tell you about it, but—somehow it escaped my mind." He pressed Shawn's hand to him, still searching for a reason why Shawn would think about those chests. Being no idiot himself, Carlton divined a way, an almost plausible explanation, for Shawn's mind to go back to those old and ugly trunks. "Thinking about that case again? The Hayworth case?"

He'd pushed too far, knowing it when Shawn grumbled, "I don't want to talk about it," and kicked himself free of sheets. Anything that reminded Shawn of old Santa Barbara, he didn't want to talk about, didn't want to deal with, didn't want to think about. It'd been funny, and, for a while, Carlton, Gus and Juliet had supposed Shawn had meant it to be funny, until it wasn't anymore and Shawn clammed up and stormed off whenever one of them brought it up. They'd stopped bringing it up. Carlton's loose morning tongue was the first reference that case had had in more than five months.

Shawn slithered into underwear and the first pair of jeans he found on the floor. Actually, now that he was home so often, he was proud to see they were the _only _pair of jeans on the floor. He gave Lassie a stern poke in the chest, harder than usual to be sure his hairy man-shield didn't protect him.

"You screwed up. Don't talk about it again. Now," he nicked a sour-tasting kiss, "I will make you breakfast—a small one—since I have plans for us this afternoon. And I'm not telling, so there's no point in asking."

"You? You planned something?"

"Of course." Shawn stopped in the doorway, perfectly framed by it. "How many of my own anniversaries do you think I've had to celebrate in my life? Try, like, zero—or maybe zero-and-a-half. Well, not many. I mean—prior to you. So—wait—two? Is that all? Huh! I need to pee and I need tea. In that order."

He zipped down the hall, out of sight, but sung a Monkees song at the top of his lungs. Carlton, lying in bed for another minute, heard the comforting sounds of kitchen cupboards banging, and, as he stepped into the bathroom the aroma of coffee filled his nostrils. He was just a smidgen afraid of Shawn's plans—but that trace of fear was far better for his heartstrings than nothing at all. He'd take it.

But what had made Shawn think of those damn old sea chests? Today, of all days? Carlton shivered as he stepped beneath the shower stream. He'd have to chalk it up as another crazy bit of proof that Shawn Spencer really was psychic.


	2. Chapter 2

2.

Gus had a bad feeling about this. It was cute and all, but that didn't stop his Psych sense from malicious tingles.

"I've got a _bad _feeling about this, Shawn. Really bad." His fingers, as if holding their own in the show of displeasure, quivered a little as he tightened one of the last strings under Shawn's left forearm.

"What could be bad about it?" came from the hollow of—of whatever the heck Shawn had made this costume out of. "It's high noon. I'm not missing a _thing_, because I can't fit another morsel in here. I can hardly cram all of me in this thing. I know Lassie's inside, and I know my dad _isn't_. Total bonus. I've got everything squared away with that super-duper wife of yours. She's been way more supportive than you."

"I won't deny that Jules is a productive amoretto. She thinks you and Lassiter are—"

"Are?" prompted Shawn. "Go on. Say it."

Gus made a face, spat a mild hiss, made another face. He returned to his labor. "She thinks you're sweet together."

"See! That wasn't so bad! And I know you think we're not."

"I'm refraining from any opinion." Although it was nice to have a happier Lassie and a happier Shawn around. "But I don't know that I agree with this plan of yours. Are you sure about this?"

Shawn pretended he heard no antagonism at all in his best friend's very even tone. "Very sure. And I'm recording _My Little Pony_, so I know I won't miss anything pop-culturally. Maybe I'll have time to watch it later. I'm still catching up on episodes. I wonder, will we even have the time? So much going on today."

"Will you hold still? I'm not done yet. Did you—uh—"

"You really need to stop inserting all these hesitations into your speeches. My self-confidence often depends on _your _self-confidence. Did I what? Pee before I got in here? You bet I did. Is the status of my bladder troubling you?"

"Not even slightly," Gus answered, continuing to fumble with knots. "Did you talk to Lassie about—about you know what? And I know you know what I'm talking about."

Letting out a brief exhalation prepared Shawn for replying. He wanted to be succinct and aloof, just not too succinct and aloof. "Not yet. Not—not in so many words. I thought I would this morning but I lost my nerve. I don't know, Gus—maybe it's not a good time for us to talk about it."

"Are you ever going to be any more ready?"

Shawn's lips and eyelids clenched. Even if he wasn't really thinking, it'd look like he was thinking. He saw Gus's point, anyway. "Yeah, all right, you win. I'll take another stab at it later, maybe after I have some wine. A lot of wine. A _lot_."

"Don't you have to work later?"

"So, okay, one little bitty sip of wine."

"Make the effort to tell him something. You'll feel better if you do."

Shawn looked around, as much as he could acquire mobility in that awkward contraption. The sky over the core of downtown Santa Barbara was bright blue, a high contrast to the traditional architecture of the station, with its terra cotta roof and off-white stucco exterior. They were on the southern end of the building, away from the front door. Enough officers and civilians were coming and going out the side door that Shawn and Gus put up with a few gawks. Most, though, didn't notice them, too busy staring at their cell phones. Shawn's mind did what it was good at: meandering out loud.

"You know what I love most about _My Little Pony_, Gus?"

"The mostly pastel color palette? The simple, thematic yet catchy songs?"

"Yes, and yes, but that's not how I was going to answer. I like that there's not one cell phone in all of Equestria. No cell phones, computers—"

"But they have magical Alicorns."

"True fact, and in my opinion, Equestria is the better for it. Ponies don't have the opposable thumbs that are really required for everyday cell phone use."

Gus played along, he and Juliet having decided that Shawn's "MLP" fascination was just a phase he was going through. At least, they kind of hoped it was. Shawn had come to rely on the show as a means of transforming his negative feelings into something cheerier. Maddie had tried explaining it to Gus and Juliet recently, in a response to a concerned and startling email they'd sent her. "No cell phones. Sure, Shawn, I'm sure that's the reason you like _My Little Pony_. Whatever it is," he paused, remembering that Maddie had suggested they exhibit a better emotional interest in Shawn's overall health, "I'm glad you won't miss anything important from Equestria. Well, I think I got all of them." He looked at Shawn in his disguise, and couldn't help but marvel—and have his stomach slosh around again. "No matter how much I beg, you're not going to reconsider, are you?"

"Of course I am _not_. I've been planning this for months. I have backers—investors! I'd hate to disappoint _them_. And Carlton. Juliet, too. Thanks for your work, young Squire Guster." Shawn laid a heavy hand on Gus's shoulder, immediately lifting it when Gus winced in pain. "Yeah, maybe this wasn't such a good idea."

"Maybe not."

"Too late now! Into the fury—!" he gestured, indicating the station's front entrance, "I ride on my trusty steed!"

Which Shawn had had ample trouble figuring out. It was a good thing he, Gus, Dobson, McNab and Juliet had gone through a dry run a couple of weeks ago.

And, honestly, the amazing exhilaration that surged through Shawn as he entered the building and flew up the stairs was not something he wanted to miss. It was the biggest thrill he'd had in months! To see the astonishment on everyone's faces! Oh, he'd arrived! He'd arrived in style! If he'd walked into the station completely naked on a horse, like Lady Godiva, he doubt the gawkers would've been able to gawk a smidgen more.

Chief Vick, hearing the unusual noise—and then the silence that followed—sauntered from her office with a terrible pressure in her throat. The sight of someone astride a horse was enough to take her breath away. A horse! In the station!

Unafraid of equines, Vick strode forward and cut through the line of pedestrians and officers that'd gathered around the spectacle. Looking behind the streaks of metal through the knight's helmet, Karen no longer knew whether she should laugh or reprimand. She never did know what to do when Shawn was up to one of his tricks.

"I think you've gone a little too far this time. At least have the decency to explain this to me. Quickly." She eyeballed the pony's tail for any sign of it lifting prior to its bowel release. Thankfully, the tail was limp, and the pony appeared less fearful and more intrigued. "Shawn, really, what is this? I should have you arrested!"

Shawn thanked Octavia for her fine behavior with a few pats at her lower neck. He needed a moment to get the Scottish brogue just right. "I've come to rescue and woo yonder detective—one Lassiter by name! I believe you know him, my Lady Provost! Be a good wench and fetch him from thither and bring him thus hither I am!"

Karen's reaction was a slight roll of the eyes and a visible reparation of her soul. Was that all? Well, she admired Shawn's ability to keep his romance with Lassiter fresh. Fresh as a fruit stand—practically fresher than an orchard. She heard McNab whispering to her.

"It's their anniversary. Two years," he said, nodding and smiling at her, as if they should all be a little proud of this. They all were a little proud of this, actually.

Karen reset herself. "Mr. Spencer—"

"Sir Spencer, if you please!" said the knight.

And what the heck was he wearing? It looked like cylinders of paperboard covered in aluminum foil and tied up with plain old cotton string. Though elaborate, it was also comical. The basinet, though—it was certainly real. The closer she looked, the more she noticed that portions of his ensemble were as real as the helmet, and the paperboard-aluminum was to make up for the missing pieces. Shawn was always good for an afternoon mind-boggle.

"Sir Spencer, then," she cast a quick glance around in the hopes of finding Carlton, "you need a _permit _to have this animal—"

"Oh, I've got that," he said in his normal, less Scottish voice. Pulled from an aluminum foil cannon, a sheet of paper. He watched the chief read it, watched her face fall as she realized its stinging legitimacy.

"Still, a horse—"

"She isn't a horse, my Lady Provost! She's a pony!" His gauntleted hands covered the pony's upright ears. "Only, she's kind of sensitive, so you might not want to mention that to her, I mean, not right to her pony face. Ah! Bless the very ground of this place! My love has come!"

For Shawn had just spotted Lassiter in the crowd. The horde split to form a row, allowing Lassiter to wander through. Shawn was beyond pleased to see the shock Carlton displayed. It was times like these that he was thankful for his photographic memory; he'd never forget it as long as he lived.

"There is my one and only true love! I've come to rescue you from a day's worth of slave labor, oh lord worthy of my praises, keeper of my heart, herald of my soul!"

Carlton could feel his face reddening. "Shawn," he growled cautiously. "I have … work to do."

"Nay! Thine hath slave labor, my love! And I've arrived in time to slash thy pinions and ride with ye to far, far freedom—where we will drink mead and picnic on the finest cuisine!"

Carlton, agog, could say nothing. He could literally think of _nothing to say_. Was this really Shawn? Was Shawn really on a pony? In that outfit? In the police department? This was what Shawn had planned? His head was spinning. This is what Shawn had planned! He felt a very real tug at his elbow. Looking over, he saw O'Hara. Thank God. At least O'Hara tended to make sense.

"Chief," Juliet bobbed her head a little and cleared her throat, "I mean, Lady Provost, I've agreed to take the majority of Detective Lassiter's work for the remainder of the afternoon. What I am unable to do, Detective Arlette has agreed to help me with."

Arlette, a strong-jawed, blue-eyed forty-something, stuck his hands in his trouser pockets and looked both titillated and embarrassed to be part of this scheme. But what a scheme! He was glad to see Tyas not far off, video recorder in hand. Someone, at least, was preserving this. "I'll do what I can to help, Lady Provost, and for you, Sir Lassiter."

The next thing Lassiter knew, Shawn was holding out a hand for him to get on the pony. He could ride pillion for a while. They were used to that, thanks to Shawn's equine work at the country club and their extended vacations at Shawn's uncle's. Shawn, an adequate horseman, though not quite as good as Carlton, got the pony turned around and stopped again.

"Farewell, peasants! I thank the canaille for their labor to secure my love!" Shawn said, giving a wide, long wave of his arm to the gathered masses. "I thank each of you for your sup—or—ORT!"

Octavia had had enough, and decided to jump down the staircase and out the open doors as fast as her hooves could take her. Once in the free air, and standing right in the middle of the main thoroughfare, she gave an exorbitant and rude snort. Since no one stopped her, she sauntered over to a bit of green space, and began munching on succulent grass.

Lassiter was still having a difficult time kicking his brain into anything that wasn't "Shawn, pony, what the hell?" Any structure of linguistics outside of that was certainly beyond him. He wrung arms around Shawn's waist, fatter than usual thanks to the width of the cuirass. While it was pleasant being on a pony with Shawn, reminding them of their vacations the last couple of years, he wondered what the point of it was. Finally, some oil of the gods had dropped on his tongue, and he was able to speak again.

"Did you do that just to impress me?"

"Well, I am always trying to impress you."

"What happened to the brogue?"

"Dude, Lass, do you know how hard it is to do a Scottish accent? Do you know how much J.M. Barrie I had to read to keep that accent fresh in my mind? No, for real, I feel like a Scottish-made sponge that's then been soaked in usquebaugh that's _then_ been soaked in the dirty, stinky, sexy laundry of Gerard Butler, _then _carried around by Alan Cumming for a week. Besides," he paused to click at Octavia and bump her flanks with his heels, "it's not like you ever wanted me to be Scottish. Unless you have some Gerard Butler or Highland duke fantasy you've never told me about, because I know Alan Cumming's not your type."

"There is something about a kilt," Carlton teased. Octavia had taken to the sidewalk, and Shawn seemed to be leading her to the next cross street north. "Where are you taking me, anyway? And how'd you get Octavia out here? This was one elaborate scheme, Shawn."

"Months of work, one very iffy and almost terrifying evening of dress rehearsals—Gus will never, ever agree to shovel manure again, you can count on it—and, yeah, all that for five minutes in the police station. But _damn_ was it worth it! Did you see the looks on their faces? I hope Tyas caught the look on yours. I want you to see it. I've never seen you look so impressed and confused before. Except that one time when we were in bed."

It was one of Shawn's on-running gags. Shawn was the only person Carlton had ever met that had on-running gags with himself. Whenever Shawn couldn't think of a way to finish saying what he'd started to say, or if he'd said something uncomfortable, he'd end it with "Except for that one time when we were in bed." Often, it made everything better, both the phrasing and its saucy origin.

"As to where we're going," Shawn whipped his voice to Imperial Mode, "I cannot tell you that."

"You said something about a picnic."

"Oh," Shawn almost laughed at himself, "I did say that, didn't I? So only part of it's a secret. But we've got a few blocks yet." Shawn patted the hands lying over his belly. "Tell me about your day."

"Fairly banal, to my surprise."

"Full moon starts tomorrow," Shawn said. "You'll have way too much to do then. Although I think it's in your Rising house, so—so that'll be—challenging."

"I enjoyed today's reprieve, believe me. Just filed reports and mused over the details of some open cases."

Once upon a time, Shawn would've been happy to hear about these open cases, and would've encouraged Lassiter to tell him all the details, maybe even would've solved one or two. Those days were turning ancient, only fresh, in a sour kind of way, in Shawn's memory, in the regret he had over his last case, in the hopeful and maudlin stares of his friends, even his dad. That he'd failed to solve that case was just skimming the surface. It was what lurked below that Shawn avoided. He patted Lassie's hands a second time.

"You're the best detective they've got, so you'll get it. Don't stress over it, Pooch."

Carlton's shoulders drooped, but he kept in the sigh, afraid that Shawn would notice. He'd been trying to get Shawn involved in a case for the last five months. Nothing worked. Not even the case of a murdered nudist at a swingers party had enticed Shawn from the placidity of his new everyday life. Most of that revolved around freelance writing, articles on astrology and, a new thing for him, the development of intuition; he'd delved into writing for a gay culture site, including the occasional pop-culture piece, and he'd recently become their weekly horoscope author. The morphing from psychic detective to comedic and lighthearted writer wasn't so enormous for Shawn. Carlton continued to feel like something was _missing _in Shawn. The last month had brought them to a point that Carlton swore he'd never repeat: couple's counseling. But there was a roughness and hollowness in Shawn, so far irreparable by love and hope. Carlton let Shawn carry on his affair with his Macbook Pro, usually early in the morning or late at night, and hoped everything turned out the way it was supposed to. Shawn had found a painting by a local artist that he'd hung in the house, a mixed media canvas carrying words from the Desiderata, "No doubt the universe is unfolding as it should."

No doubt it was. Carlton just wanted it to unfold a little faster.

Then again, maybe not. Two years had already swung right by, and he didn't know how he'd get through the first day let alone the first month, the first year—and he didn't have to wonder about it anymore.

"I hope it's not far," grumbled Carlton. "You're a lot nicer to hold when you're not made of metal."

"In a kilt?"

"Don't tease me. How'd you get Octavia?"

"I borrowed her. Don't worry," Shawn almost laughed, "she's a good pony, and Morrissey is picking her up when we reach our destination. I told you, I have this planned out down to the smallest detail."

"It's pretty amazing, you know." Carlton was tickled and amused that Shawn had done something so elaborate.

"Well, I'm a pretty amazing guy. I was going to change my middle name to Amazing, but I find it's much too difficult to write out Z's in a signature."

"I can't wait to see what you come up for our tenth or twentieth anniversary."

"I might have notebooks filling up on the premise of those maneuverings too, but, h'mm, perhaps I shouldn't spoil the surprise."

"Yeah, don't. I like your surprises."

They were honked at several times by passing vehicles, and were followed by an SBPD patrol car. The big head and shoulders of McNab were recognizable behind the glare of the windshield. Officer Kennedy, only in her second year on the Force, told them that they were there as an escort. "Chief Vick's idea," she concluded. Carlton was astonished that Shawn had no humorous retort, but quietly kept Octavia on her steady pace.

Carlton knew they'd neared their destination when the round edges of a horse trailer caught his eye. He didn't really know where they were, and had been enjoying the ride—how many times in his life was he going to ride a pony through the city?—without giving a thought as to their location. Now, whipping out calculations and remembering which turns they'd taken, and by the look of the building he passed often but rarely entered, Carlton made his assessment known.

"You're bringing us to the library?"

It was true. Young Atlanta Morrissey waited at the foot of the open horse trailer in the library parking lot. She took Octavia's reins as the pony neared, and kicked the stool within Shawn's reach. He would've shunned the use of it if he hadn't been wearing such a cumbersome costume. Lassie slid off first, and spotted Shawn's graceful descent. Morrissey was in a fit of giggles. Shawn had had a hand in getting the high school senior hired at the country club, specifically for the stables. She'd been around horses all her life, did dressage shows, some jumping, and had more ribbons for her achievements than Shawn cared to count. She knew more about horses than he did, but he knew what the horses were thinking. They considered themselves symbiotic coworkers. Plus, Shawn had an innate affection for anyone he could call Morrissey, after the former lead singer of The Smiths and popular soloist. She got Octavia in the trailer and Shawn closed the doors.

"Must've gone all right," Morrissey said in a clandestine whisper while she and Shawn had a second away from Lassiter. She was a little terrified of Shawn's significant other, and didn't know what the two of them saw in each other. "He's here, anyway."

"Nothing happened. I don't even think Octavia took a dump the whole way."

"I'll drive back that way just in case you were in too amorous a mood to notice." She laughed again, whipped out here phone and snapped a photo of the two of them. "This is definitely going on my next status update. Don't forget the game tonight. You have to be there at six o' clock. Want me to message you at five-thirty so you don't forget?"

Shawn pressed his two hands against his hard chest. "If I could feel my heart right now through this metal, Morrissey, it would be warmer and ten times its normal size. What would I do without you?"

"Be late a lot and probably get fired. Duh. Okay, boss, have fun." She tried to say something to Lassiter, but failed miserably. Trying to talk to Carlton Lassiter was like trying to talk to a man who combined the shame brought on by the Pope and the fear brought on by Simon Cowell. Turning magenta, far more pink than her curly red hair, Morrissey hurried into the truck, the country club's stylish logo painted on the door.

"Bye, Octavia. I'll give you an extra treat when I see you later!" Shawn called after the horse in the trailer. He heard Octavia's distinct baritone whinny and returned to Lassie in front of the library doors.


	3. Chapter 3

There must be no love interest.  
The business in hand is to bring a criminal to the bar of justice,  
not to bring a lovelorn couple to the hymeneal altar.

**S.S. Van Dine  
**_20 Rules for Writing Detective Stories_, ca. 1928

3.

Still not sure what they were doing at the library, of all places in the city, Carlton waited, since Shawn waited, too. Opening his mouth to say something, Carlton started as the door opened. A man snappily attired in a peasant's Renaissance costume held it open.

"Good evening, my lords. Your journey was swift and true, I trust?"

Lassiter was beside himself—amused but yet not amused. He recognized the handsome face beneath the floppy velvet hat. "This isn't what I pay my taxes for, Alwin. Don't you have a firetruck to clean?"

Alwin was often called "Dobson's Mike." Not to be confused with Tanglevine owners Mike B. and Mike C. That the three of them happened to be friends, since the Vine had turned out to be something of a cop joint, they were called the ABC's (of Mikes). While addressing firefighter Michael Alwin to his face, however, they generally just called him Alwin or, to everyone's chagrin and confusion, Mike. He merely flashed his brilliant set of pearly whites and took off his hat. "If you find the service not to your liking, please take it up with my husband, whom I believe you know."

Lassiter grabbed the velvet cap and shoved it against Mike's face. But he started chuckling, a quiet and small thing afraid of its own power, and all was well among the three of them. Alwin ushered them into the library. To Lassie's embarrassment, the library was quite open for the public and many patrons were at the computers or in the stacks browsing traditional paper books.

"I hope you have another permit shoved someplace," he mumbled Shawn's direction.

"Relax, I got it under control. Would I lie to you on one of the most important days of our life? H'mm? Really, look at this face." Shawn raised the helmet's visor, and of course all Carlton could see were Shawn's eyes. They were expressive, honest enough, though tinctured with the slightest hint of crap. Carlton slapped the visor back down: Shawn jumped at the noise. "Right in my ear, Lassie. _Right _in my ear! You're going to pay for that later."

Alwin stopped at one of the private study rooms in the back. Another woman stood there, dressed in modern clothes but with a conical hat and a feathery train of silky fabric spewing out of its top.

"Greetings, gentlemen," she started, gesturing to the table covered in picnic wares. "As you can see, our best table has been reserved for you."

"Thanks, Pilar," Shawn said to his favorite librarian. He was excited that everything was going so well. Maybe he could even talk to Lassie about that thing that he'd been avoiding. "Everything looks wonderful. I couldn't have planned it better myself."

"You did plan this yourself, Shawn," said Alwin. He'd known Shawn about eight months, had known _of _him a lot longer. He just didn't quite _get _Shawn. Dobson had the same problem. "Well, I gotta get back to the firehouse. Lunch break's almost over. Have fun, you two. Coming, Lady Librarian?"

Alwin held the door open for Pilar, and it shut with a squeak when they left. The ugly tan mini-blinds had been drawn across the two windows, and a sense of privacy came over the anniversary subjects. Shawn shoved the tip of his helmet to Lassie's chest.

"Tug."

"That'd better not be the most romantic thing I hear from you today."

"I rather doubt it. I'll grunt really provocatively when you do tug."

"I was hoping that undressing you at some point would be the least difficult portion of my day." He grabbed the helmet and pulled. It came off easily. As promised, Shawn let out a particularly pleasant moan. "I was expecting that to be harder."

Shawn winced. "Too—many—puns."

"Did you butter that huge Scottish cranium of yours before you put this on or what?"

"Cooking spray," Shawn joked, smiled, then flattened his face. "Am I kidding, or am I not? You'll never get me to squeal, copper."

"I'm checking the cooking spray when we get home." Carlton turned the helmet around in his hands. As far as he could tell, it looked like a genuine Dark Ages relic. "Where'd you get all of this, anyway, Ye Olde Don Quixote Shoppe?"

"Nope, much like the secret of my greasy Scottish cranium, I can't tell you that either, sweet, sweet lover of mine. Well, aside from the somewhat more obvious handmade portions of my outfit, which came chiefly from our friends, and my dad seems to go through an awful lot of paperboard for a man who lives almost entirely on red meat and fish. I had our friends help me, and I worked on it while you were at work and while I wasn't at work. Barely got it done in time, though." Shawn left his hands out. "Pull my gauntlets, Lassie. You know you want to. Promise, no bodily noises. Unless you kiss me, and our lips make that nice slurpy smacking noise."

Carlton's amusement showed in his eyes, pulling off Shawn's gauntlets without a kiss. He was very aware of the surrounding public building, mini-blinds or no mini-blinds. Aside from a few rambunctious interludes while camping, he tended to prescribe to the same belief as Rachel's troubled spouse in the film _Imagine Me & You_: They have their own house, with their own bed, and they didn't have to do stuff like that anymore, now that they were mature and old. Shawn would never act his age, besides the occasional glimpse of it, and far too much of that had happened since the disastrous Hayworth case. But Carlton did provide Shawn with a brief nuzzle as he passed by. He dropped the gauntlets in the helmet, and left both on a table covered in delicious eats.

"This is strange-looking food, Shawn."

"Old food. I had a theme. Can't you tell? That's roasted lamb that Lady Olga made for us. Jules and Gus brought the bread. I assume it's from Breezeway's, but I wouldn't _swear _to it. My dad brought us the bottles of mead. And I made the tarts."

Carlton stared.

"Yes, I can bake without needing a fire extinguisher or the services of our valet. And I made these for us. Apple tarts. They're good. I ate one earlier to be sure that, you know, I didn't drop down dead or anything. How embarrassing would that have been? And sucky for you, too, on our anniversary and all, having me just die like that. Death by tart. Not exactly the way I'd like to go. Um, on that note, let's eat!"

He hurried them into chairs now that he was starting to feel like now would be the opportune time to talk to Carlton about that _thing _that he'd been dreading. Was it really necessary to bring it up? He supposed it was. Gus wouldn't let him rest until he did. If Gus wouldn't, neither would Juliet. Let the vicious cycle of nagging end before it began!

Carlton was still in a state of amazement, and sometimes his brain unwound entirely, leaving him with nothing to say for seconds together. "How'd you do all of this? And why the library?"

"The library because I like it here, and Pilar is awesome. Having two of three kids in the gay way will do that to a woman, I guess. Want to eat now or just talk? I want us to spend some time together. I'm sorry about the polo match tonight. I asked them to reschedule, but you know how it goes when you're the lowly serf at the stables."

"You manage the stables," Carlton added friskily.

"Co-manage," amended Shawn. "And that doesn't give me enough power to tell them not to schedule me on a night of an important polo matchup. Stupid equestrian games. Stupid polo playoffs. Stupid hunky guys in uniforms."

"Don't ogle them too much. I know how those polo players are."

"Really? How _are _they, Lassie? I'm suddenly very curious."

"It isn't them so much as you being a magnet that attracts them."

Shawn had no idea how to handle that compliment. "Gosh, yeah, it'd be nice if I could just wear some kind of symbol to let other people know I'm taken. I'll wear my rainbow bead necklace. That'll scare them off. Things might even end early."

"At least you'll be done by the time we have to go to the airport." Carlton finally tried the lamb, and found it much more savory than he thought it'd be. Lady Olga wasn't a bad chef, after all. Must be those southern roots. Shawn's continued silence unnerved Carlton. "You will be going to the airport with me, won't you? I don't want to pick them up by myself. I hardly _know _them!"

"No, it'll be fine. Really." Shawn grabbed Carlton's hands and pressed. "Really, I'll be there. Breathe. It'll be okay. They won't bite your head off or anything. They might interrogate you slightly and vet you to a noticeable degree, but you can put up with that! You're tough as nails! I mean, how many times have you been—"

Carlton stopped chewing. Shot? How many times had he been shot? Is that was Shawn was going to say? But Shawn had gotten shot too many times, and it seemed he was still having trouble talking about it and facing it. He picked up the bottle of mead. "Have some more of this, sweet, sweet lover of mine. I shouldn't be drinking it—I have to go back to the office."

"Vick won't be checking your breath. I already asked her not to."

"It's really weird, but I believe you. Then let us drink and be merry, love, for in another hour we have to go back to work!"

Shawn smiled, relieved that Lassie had the presence of mind to distract him. He clinked the top of their pewter goblets together. He sipped and ate, ate and sipped, and while masticating the heck out of the chewy but delicious bread, he finally knew he'd have to do it. He'd have to say it. He'd have to. If he didn't, he'd never say it and they'd never talk about it, and he and Gus would be in a whole lot of trouble with their domestic partners. Of course, Gus had already talked to Juliet about it, but still—

"I have something to tell you," Shawn blurted out.

When Carlton noted Shawn's pale lips and startled eyes, he dropped his fork and had another sip of mead, just in case. A very large sip of mead. "What about?"

Shawn's throat constricted, and while he was having trouble catching his breath, his heart managed to beat in his stomach, across the back of his neck, everywhere but where it was supposed to. His head swam, and he could feel perspiration prickling his armpits—but that might've been the thickness of the costume and the heat of the small room.

"Shawn?" Carlton prompted. He tried to think really fast. What was it? Something bad. All he had to do was look at Shawn to know it was bad. Shawn had gone to the doctor last week—and—and he'd seemed a lot quieter since. "Is something wrong? Are you okay?"

Shawn spit out the first thing that made any sense to him. "I love you—and I'm fine. I'm not sick."

Carlton's emotions dropped several degrees. "What'd you scare me for? Is it something else? Are you—"

"Jeez, Lass, I'm not breaking up with you. Will you just—just let me tell you—"

"You can tell me anything."

From the depths of the picnic basket, then on the floor by his feet, Shawn pulled out a small clipping from a magazine. With a trembling hand, he gave it to Carlton. He waited a second for Carlton to let it sink in. As soon as Carlton lifted his gaze, Shawn licked his wavering lips and spilled the secret.

"I know where the third sea chest is. That's why I asked you about it this morning. And I'm going to—" He gulped and sweated and practically _heard _his stomach churning. "I'm going to look into it with Gus. For now. I just wanted you to know."

Carlton tried not to show too much enthusiasm. "I think that's good."

"Good?"

"You can look into it if you want. Why didn't you want to tell me?"

"Because I swore off solving cases after—after—" He gave up trying to mention it. His therapist had suggested he try talking about it, even if he was alone in the house by himself. Talk about it out loud. But that seemed weirder and even creepier, even in Swedish, even in ASL. "I said I wouldn't do anything else except chase around some cheaters. And only then it would have to be the worthy cheaters whose cheatees pay well. I'll stop this sea-chest hunt if it gets dangerous, if I smell even a modicum of cordite, Lassie, I'm bolting."

"That's up to you. You know I've always supported you. I even read your articles for typos. I believe in you, Shawn, and I know you have talents, whether those talents are spiritual or magical or what-have-you. It's … it's been hard on you, I think, not solving cases. But I know these sea chests mean something to you, whatever that something is." He scooted the article back to Shawn using a forefinger on the table. "You have my blessing, just as long as this isn't going to prevent you from going to the airport with me tonight."

"No," Shawn's small grin lightened, the burden removed, "it won't. It won't interfere with anything. Anyway, I can't wait to tell them about it when they get here. Maybe they'll want to help."

"Why would they want to help?"

"I sense it, that's why. The way I sense many things, Lassie, except that one time we were in bed."

Carlton snickered, then broke into a laugh. "Eat your lamb, smartass. And tell me again what Jason and Sean Laramie have been up since you saved Sean from a murder trial." He was afraid Shawn would dwell. It'd taken a lot of therapy, ice cream and _My Little Pony_ to bring Shawn back from the depths the Hayworth case had dumped him, and any reminder of a case-gone-bad could shift Shawn into a semi-catatonic state again. "I haven't seen them since they went away together."

"First of all, you can't call Sean Laramie _Sean_. Don't laugh. I'm dead serious." He waited for Lassie's airy chuckles to subside. "You have to call him See-an. It's the only way I'm going to put up with having two Shawns around."

"He spells it differently."

"He spells it See-an. I'm the phonetic Shawn. See-an and I have already agreed on this, and we expected everyone to comply while the two of us are in the same room. I fully expect to call him Avery at least a half-dozen times, too. But our boy's all grown up, got himself hitched, and has his husband's last name. I bet he still has a stripper's physique, though, and killer eyes. No, don't pout, I like yours better. Maybe I should change my name when I get married. Shawn the Amazing_. _Lassie, I insist you change your surname to The Amazing."

Knowing Shawn's views on marriage—through osmosis, long talks with Juliet and, of all people, Dobson and the ABC's, Carlton had no fear of playing along—at least mildly. "I'll see what I can do about that. Do you even want me to ask about the third sea chest?"

Shawn shook his head, diving into the remaining bits of Lady Olga's excellent roasted lamb. "If I find out anything interesting, I'll tell you. It's just a lead at this point. And damn those polo players! If they didn't have that match this evening—" Shawn noticed the thinnest thread of annoyance in Lassie's face, and promptly shifted his saying—with a Texas twang. "Why I'd be swinging you on the back of my trusty steed, Lassie, and we'd be riding off to make sweet and sassy jambalaya out in the nectars of this good earth, and below the blazing heavens."

"I never heard a Medieval knight from range before."

"Ain't too many like me, Lassie."

Thank goodness. A man only had one heart. "I've also never heard it called jambalaya before. You know how I feel about food metaphors."

"I've heard you mention it a time or two, and I've seen how it gets your dander up a bit, Pooch. Except for that one time when we was in bed. You didn't mind so much then."

Carlton let this go. His mind was beginning to regret the few hours of work he had left, the long hours before Shawn returned from the country club—stinking of horse and horridly sweaty. God, he couldn't wait. "Are you done eating? Need a ride to work? I can swing by the station and pick up the car."

"No need for that," Shawn started, getting up from the chair with ample cringes, "I've got it taken care of."

"Enough with the accent."

"But it's sort of natural-like. I can't seem to help it." Shawn returned to himself with a soft kiss from Lassie, first on his cheek, then on his mouth. "Thanks, I needed that. I also wanted it, so I'm a winner all around. No, don't clean up." He waved his hands as Carlton, took the plate out of his hands and shoved the remains of the chewy bread in his mouth. "Alwin and Pilar agreed to clean up for us."

"And why the library again?"

"Obviously, I couldn't ride Octavia all the way to the house! And I really wanted to do the horse thing. I conspired with Pilar and she said it was okay if we had our little tryst here. You and me. Not me and Pilar. That would be weird. And I can't even—ugh. I'm going to have some more mead. This is good stuff." He sipped, leaving the goblet on the table. "You look very dashing today, by the way. Everyone's amazed that I got you to wear an orange shirt."

"It's peach." Carlton patted the collar and tie knot self-consciously. It was a pretty peach shirt that Shawn had given as a birthday present. Months had passed before he had the balls to wear it. It strongly resembled the color of one of Shawn's beloved Little Ponies.

"You say peach, I say _oh-raaange_, so we'd better call the calling off—off. I don't think that's how Gershwin wrote it. All right, Pooch, let's get out of here. But kiss your savage and unruly knight first. After all, I work around unpredictable equines all day, and you get shot at by unruly civilians who experience an above-average rate of recidivism. These are dangerous days in the kingdom, my lord. We must be on our guard."

Dangerous days? Shawn forgot all about it once loss in a good kiss that curled his toes, sweaty in their cotton socks and leather boots. Curling nonetheless.

Back at the front door, Alwin tipped his velvet cap as he let them out. Waiting at the curb, a black limousine. Carlton was in shock.

"You hired a limousine to take us four blocks?"

"It's also taking me to work. You can go home, if you'd like. No one would hold it against you if you didn't go back to the office, not even the chief."

"You know I can't do that. I wouldn't mind going home if you were going to be there."

"But, since I'm not—yeah, I know. I'm heading off to work pretty early. Mandatory meeting with the bossman, and I'll need Morrissey's help getting out of this thing I'm wearing. Don't worry, she won't be scarred by what's underneath. I have my nude-colored leotard on, so we're good. I'll save it for later."

He nibbled Lassie's lower lip, now in the privacy of the limousine. They were kissing, the car was moving, and suddenly they were not kissing and the car had stopped.

"Damn, that really was a short trip. Ah well, we're at your castle's portcullis, my prince, and I wish thee a pleasant evening."

"Have a good day at the horsey office, Shawn. Thanks for lunch. And for being you. It's never a dull moment with you, Spencer."

"Except for—"

"That one time we were in bed. Yes, I know." He hugged Shawn, adding depth and feeling into it as only he could. He kissed Shawn by the ear. "Happy anniversary."

"Happy anniversary, Lass."

Carlton waited until the limousine drove out of sight, then kicked up the heels of his shiny black shoes to take the stairs two at a time. He couldn't wait to tell O'Hara what had transpired over lunch.

oOo

Story note links are in my profile!


	4. Chapter 4

The detective novel must have a detective in it;  
and a detective is not a detective unless he detects.

**S.S. Van Dine  
**_20 Rules for Writing Detective Stories_, ca. 1928

4.

By the time Shawn started helping the teams' staff with the horses, he was fairly happy to be involved in something that required concentration. His mind had been wandering the last three hours, during the work meeting and after it. The majority of labor he'd relegated to Morrissey, but she went home at six—the busy life of a high school senior! Shawn spent an hour at paperwork (which involved the computer more than paper), bored though focused, beyond thrilled when the players started to show up. There were plenty of polo ponies to get out of trailers, equipment to ready, the field to go over (incidentally, the largest field in outdoor sports)—and Shawn was so busy he didn't have a chance to think about the sea chests, Gus or even picking up See-an and Jason at the airport.

Ten minutes before the seven o' clock match, Gus entered the big barn at the country club. Hunting for Shawn somewhere in his vast domain of equines was often so challenging it required a phone call and a "Where _are _you?" Not tonight. Gus walked in and found Shawn brushing down a pretty ebony-coated horse in cross ties. A polo player, presumably the rider of the horse, sat in a dusty chair nearby. Two staff members from the competing Malibu team applied their hands to inspecting the player's helmet and the horse's saddle. Polo was serious business, for all Shawn claimed to dislike it. One little oversight could lead to someone getting hurt. It was a wonder Shawn had the concentration for so much, though by then the teams knew him, and it'd be frustrating for them to break in someone else. There was no denying that Shawn was good with the horses, as odd as it was.

"Hello, Gus," Shawn said, perfectly chipper. "Come for some pony lovin'? Rubbing soft noses is a cure for what ails you."

"I came to see the match. Hugo Brennaman's son is on the Malibu team." Gus didn't say that he thought it'd look good to one of the higher-ups at the pharmaceutical company if he attended. Team support never hurt anyone in the corporate world. He would've told Shawn exactly that, if the player waiting for his horse wasn't also on the Malibu team. Maybe team support didn't hurt anyone, unless it led to the classification of flagrant kowtowing. That would not be so beneficial. "And I came to ask how it went with Lassiter. Did you talk to him about the—you know—the thing that we're planning to do?"

Shawn traded a rough brush for a hoof pick. He liked Zachi, Eric Moore's preferred horse. Zachi was one of the few on the Malibu team that didn't mind having his feet gone over and cleaned. "Of course I did," Shawn replied to Gus. "I'm not a coward—usually. Plus, there was mead involved. But I sweated while I asked him, if that justifies your worry about it, Gus. And I told him if that I caught so much as the stench of cordite, I'd quit."

Eric Moore's chair snapped back to all four feet. He'd been leaning into it, relaxing before the match, but at the mention of cordite— He knew Shawn Spencer used to work for the SBPD. Last he'd heard, Shawn had given that up. "Going back into the private investigator business, Shawn?"

"Just this one time, Eric."

Gus was flabbergasted by Shawn's casualness. That was _Eric Moore_, CEO of Five Star, a Los Angeles production studio that cranked out at least one blockbuster a year. And Shawn was calling him Eric, like they'd gone to high school together. Eric! Now Gus's pits prickled damply.

"Must be something worthwhile," Eric commented.

"Something that goes back to our childhood."

"Well," Eric lifted a shoulder—a brawny, hunky shoulder upon which rested Oscar nominations, "you gotta do it, then. You go off and talk to Gus. You're Gus, right? I figured you were."

Gus's throat tightened as he shook hands with Eric Moore. He managed to think of Eric Moore—Eric Moore, Eric Moore!—as another client to whom he was selling high quality chemistry and pharmacopeia. The underarm river dried up. "Yes, sir, I am Gus—Burton Guster. It's a pleasure to make your acquaintance."

Shawn's eyes lifted up to the sky. Gus was using his business voice, mixed with just a smidgen of his lower-pitched flirtatious voice. Gus argued that it was supposed to charm men who were not used to being charmed by other men. So Gus _had _learned something from Shawn's relationship with Lassie, even if it was how to make an ass out of himself in a new and exciting way. Eric Moore, though, didn't seem bothered. He was probably used to being charmed by men.

"I hope that you boys solve your new case successfully. I got this, Shawn," Eric said, taking the pick. "It's about time we got on the field, anyway. Enjoy the match, Gus."

"Thank you, sir, I will!"

Eric pulled Zachi out of the barn with the reins, and his two servitors toddled off behind him. Gus shook his head, clicking his tongue.

"You do keep interesting company, Shawn. Why didn't you tell me you were on a first-name basis with Eric Moore? _The _Eric Moore?"

"It hardly comes up in conversation, and you know how I don't like to name-drop. Besides," he swung into a flannel shirt he'd left nearby, "this is my job, my place of business. In my professional surroundings, I don't like to seem—you know—"

"What? Don't want to seem like what? Like you're in charge around here? Most of the time, you really are in charge around here."

"Sycophantic. I don't like to act sycophantic." Shawn buttoned shirt cuffs, still trying to get his point across. "It's hard to be taken seriously when you shovel horse shit for a living, you gotta admit. The powerful and elite of Santa Barbara and most of Southern Cal are at my elbows, Gus, and I don't want to fawn all over them."

Shawn just wanted to do his job, and Gus knew that. Shawn was still pleased to be working there, even after taking two months off, though he could hardly help that. Being in a coma for a week, in the hospital for three—well, Jefferson Roberts, the club's human resources manager, couldn't exactly fire Shawn Spencer for being incapacitated. If Gus read people at all, Jefferson was pleased that Shawn had recuperated so quickly, and, what was more, pleased that he'd wanted to return to the country club. With Waylon Scobie, the equine manager, dead and gone, Jefferson had appointed Shawn as assistant manager of the stables and its grounds. A new manager had been brought in from a country club outside Seattle. Tina Athens really ran the business side of the barns, but Shawn still had the most interaction with the horses, their people, and the country club staff. Multiple times had Tina admitted that the stables would crumble without Shawn.

This being a polo match, not a baseball game, there were umbrellaed tables set up around the lawn, close to the field but not too close. And being a Wednesday evening event, attire was a little more casual, many jeans and, coincidentally, polo shirts. Gus hardly felt out of place in his gold polo and black twill trousers. Shawn, on the other hand… Shawn would've looked out of place had he been wearing a Santa Barbara Country Club Polo Team ensemble. This didn't bother Shawn. He found them a table in the back, but Gus was soon off to pay homage to Hugo Brenneman. To be fair, Brenneman did look gratified that one of his employees paid attention to the company policy that they treat one another like family.

Shawn had ordered them lemonades from Gerta, one of the servers at the upscale club events. He didn't know Gerta well, but Gerta knew him. She was still at the table, asking him questions about his life and if he was going to the Tanglevine Club anytime soon and if they were going to have any good shows and if—

Gerta talked a mile a minute. She was also gay. She was also a huge fan of Shawn's. Thankfully, she was a bit bashful in front of Gus, and wandered off as soon as Gus took his seat. Gus shook his head at Shawn again.

"How do you make people fall in love with you?"

"She's not in love with me—just—just a garrulous admirer. For a segue, it looked like Hugo was in love with you."

"Hardly that, just thrilled to see me. Guess I'm the only one from work that showed up. So, what did Lassiter say about the sea chests?"

"You mean Juliet didn't give you a verbatim account as soon as she got home? I'm astonished. And disbelieving. Mostly disbelieving. Surely Lassie would've dished the whole thing to her as soon as he was back inside."

"Why do you say that? Maybe they were busy."

"Maybe you're a big fat liar," Shawn threw at him teasingly. "I know they weren't busy because Lassie told me so when we were riding to the library. He said they'd been going over cold case files. That equals a boring day in Lassieland."

Gus steeled his eyes against Shawn's provocation. Finally, he had to give in. "She said that Lassie had said a few things, but not everything. So, what did he say? To you? Specifically?"

"Just that he was glad I was going to look into it—with you. That's really all. So, here's how I want this to play out tomorrow. You call me in the morning."

"In the morning? Like, nine-thirty, or eleven-thirty? My morning and your morning don't match up."

"I don't care, pick one! I think See-an—"

"Please stop calling him that. It's Sean."

"It's See-an. I think See-an and Jason will be staying with us, at least that was the last I heard."

Gus picked at this. He couldn't help it. Something about it went against his need to have everything as clear-cut as possible. "Wait a second. You haven't talked to them today?"

"I got a message from See-an—"

"Please stop calling him that."

"From See-an this morning that he was packing and that he'd see us later. But, no—no, haven't heard from either of them. They're probably somewhere over Nevada right now. Maybe Utah. Hang on. Which one's shaped like a big square with a big hat? That's Utah, isn't it? I bet that's what they're flying over right now."

Giving no answer, Gus sipped his lemonade.

"What I'm thinking is that you pick us up tomorrow—"

"You're bringing them with us?"

"Gus, don't be the Poky Little Puppy. They're coming with us. I'm not _bringing _them. It'll be like a field trip. They swore that if I ever visit them in New York I could follow them around at their jobs all day."

"Jason's a corporate mastermind. His real job would bore you. And I don't think Sean should let you follow him to the set where he works. We all know what happened the last time you infiltrated a soap opera."

"That was a Spanish-speaking soap opera, Gus! Completely different! And we're only trying to find a sea chest. It's not like we'll—" Palish, Shawn cut himself off.

"You don't want to say it, do you?"

Shawn rapidly wagged his head.

"You're afraid of jinxing it."

Shawn nodded. He wasn't going to jinx their simple little investigation into an old sea chest. He started talking again. "We'll go over to Mrs. Glass'—Glass's? Glass'? Hey, what's the word on that, grammar swami?"

"You're asking me? You're the big freelance writer now, shouldn't you know?"

Shawn studied the middle distance as if his life depended on it. "I think tirelessly of apostrophes when I'm editing an article, Gus. Do I really have to think about them when I'm speaking, too? They're, like, totally invisible when we're talking. Why should I pay attention to them? There's some rule of thumb about apostrophes. Is it how your pronounce it? Yes, I think that might be it. And the fact that the grammar swamis back in the day did not like having more than two S's in a word. Probably didn't want Shakespeare, et alii writing out their plays looking like it was full of typos. So—we're going to Mrs. Glass'—S-apostrophe—house and kindly ask her about the sea chest. It sounds simple."

"Which means it'll probably be very difficult."

"Let's hope not. I don't want difficult, not with See-an and Jason in town. But it would be nice to know if I was right all along."

"And by 'all along' you mean since 1994."

"Precisely. That I was right all along and there are _three _sea chests, not just two. Huh! Maybe I really am psychic! No, no, that'd be too ironic. I couldn't handle it. I'd have to put that panoply back on, and then I'd really be ironic. Get it? Because of the iron and the—"

"You're not psychic. And this sea chest will be different than the other two: this one won't a goopy dead body in it."

Shawn twitched, trying to rid the air of the curse Gus might've just put on their investigation. "Yeah," he whimpered, "yeah, without a goopy dead body in it." That wasn't a jinx so much as a prayer. He politely applauded when the the Malibu team scored. At least, he thought they scored, but he really didn't know a whole lot about polo but that it was like field hockey on horseback.

"Really hot guys on horses," he text to Lassiter. "Wish you were here."

"I wish you were here," Lassiter texted back. He was _slowly _getting a hang of texting. Sexy texting? Not quite.

Shawn smirked, thumbing of a better reply. "Actually, I wish I were at home and we were in bed!"

"Yes me too."

"You know, Pooch, if wishes were polo horses I'd have a whole pitch full of them. O what do you know, I do, I do!"

-x-

As Gus was in no state of mind to watch Shawn "put away" (Gus's phrasing, not Shawn's) the polo ponies, Shawn had to find a way of getting home. More than any other night, aside from his first back at work after being hurt, he wanted to get home. He wanted a cup of tea, a little quiet time in a nice, quiet house before it was disrupted by very welcome visitors, and, possibly, the dirtiness that came with a case. Shawn remembered littering the dining room table with debris, newspaper clippings, notes, pens, even the detritus of dirty laundry as he tossed aside his "sloppies" in the middle of his study. If Carlton thought this willy-nilly side of investigating an odd practice for a man who danced among the innate talents of observation, magic, determination and just a touch of healthy psychosis, he never said as much. Carlton had long ago assumed that Shawn wasn't exactly psychic, not exactly _not _psychic, either. Shawn solved cases using feats too extraordinary for everyday, run-of-the-mill humans. And, anyway, to Carlton, Shawn was no more disgustingly idiosyncratic than Sherlock Holmes. All the greats had their quirks. Shawn vowed he'd keep the house a lot cleaner than he did during his final days rooting around in the history of Santa Barbara's first great family, the Hayworths. It was only a stupid old sea chest they were after.

That's what Shawn kept telling himself while he brushed down horses and doled out grain and hay, and while walking horses into their trailers and sending them on down the road. Malibu had toppled the perfect record of the local favorites, and Timothy Westcott, _the _Santa Barbara Team Hunk if ever there was one, had been tossed off his horse. All and all, it was a lot of excitement, a lot of work, and Shawn was a sweaty mess by the time Gerta came round to offer him a ride home.

He loathed to accept, hoping a better offer might come his way. He was saved from lying to her, telling her he'd already been promised a ride, when her phone rang and she waved a farewell at him. Aside from the cater-waiters stacking lawn chairs beneath the faint white strand lights, Shawn was virtually alone at the stables. If worse came to worse, and he had no way home now the buses had quit running for the night, he'd get Lassie to pick him up on the way to the airport. That'd defeat the object of getting home, showering, changing clothes, having a cup of tea before greeting their visitors. But it'd be better than staying at the stables all night.

To his surprise, it was Westcott who came into the stables with the offer of a ride. The two were mild acquaintances, as much as Shawn, the stables' assistant manager, could be acquainted with anyone who paid for premium membership at the club. And Westcott wasn't entirely unknown to Shawn. His family's history was sufficiently and curiously intertwined with that of the Hayworths. The two families had been at one another's throats in the first fifteen years of the twentieth century. Each wanted to buy up as much acreage as they could. Westcott's ancestor had helped design much of the city's layout. The Hayworths, meanwhile, had donated much of their land to the country club. While the Hayworths had all but vanished from Santa Barbara following the Second World War, the Westcotts remained active and recognizable. There'd even been a cop in the clan, an uncle of Timothy's that Shawn remembered from his childhood spent in and out of the SBPD. Timothy continued to support the SBPD as often as he could, and used it as a conversation piece while driving Shawn home. Westcott was considering a run for City Council, thinking it'd be the best way to do the most good. Shawn said nothing encouraging and nothing degrading. He probably would vote for Westcott regardless; Timothy was much better at business than a lot of the people currently in the Council. He'd certainly get the cop vote, and probably that of a lot of other union workers.

Shawn nearly lost his breath as Timothy, parking the car in the driveway of Shawn and Carlton's small bungalow, made a point of mentioning the Hayworths.

"I want to do something with that damn old house of the Hayworths', too. If nobody else is going to do anything with it."

Way too familiar with the castle-like structure on the northeast side of town, Shawn tried to think about it more rationally than he had in months. A part of him had grown to hate the Hayworths, and a part of him felt like they'd been haunting him. "You should. Somebody should. It just sits there. Takes up space. It could be making some kind of tax revenue for the city."

"That's exactly the point I mean to make. I thought I might try to find some investors and buy the place myself. Turn it into a museum. 'Founding Families of Santa Barbara' maybe." He saw the porch light blink on, Carlton probably wandering who Shawn was sitting in the car with. Not too many Ferraris landed in Shawn and Carlton's driveway. "Better get out before he gets suspicious," he laughed. "I know better than to rile Carlton's jealousy."

"It's nice to feel wanted," Shawn said. And it did, too. Carlton's jealousy wasn't so bad. Worse than some, maybe, better than others. "Sorry about the loss. And Rosewater throwing you off, too."

"I'll live. Good work tonight. I always say we wouldn't have scored half our goals if our staff weren't so talented."

Shawn thanked him, exchanged pleasantries, and hurried into the house. Exhausted, he was pleased to have Lassie to lean against for a solid minute—even slightly more than a minute. Shawn engaged him in a few intense osculations, finally remembering that time was zooming right by.

"Quickie in the shower?" Shawn asked, already taking off his shirt and heading down the hall.

Again, Carlton was reminded of Hector in _Imagine Me & You_. He rammed into Shawn, picked him up, carried him four feet into their room, and dumped him on the bed. "How long do you think it takes me to get my clothes off?"

An answer wasn't required. Acting with precision and sped on by familiarity, they had all the important clothes out of the way in seconds. Even though Shawn felt far more disgusting and dirty than usual, stinking of horse, barn and sweat, his partner didn't seem to mind so much. It was flagrantly awful in a way that made it humorous and enjoyable.

Shawn was in the shower having his scalped scrubbed by shampoo and Lassie's fingertips. "Remind me next anniversary not to have anything going on. We can go away somewhere. That, what we just did, was exactly the way we don't like it, quick and hard." He blew suds off his face, right into Lassie. "At least I smell better now."

"That's a matter of some debate." But Carlton always did like the smell of the outdoors on Shawn. His inamorato's outdoor work, and their lovely, lovely bed, happened to combine two favorite things. It would be nice not to feel rushed next anniversary. He took down the handheld shower head. "Hold your breath, rinse time."

When they were rinsed, cleansed and toweling off, Carlton asked him what he planned to do with Jason and Sean while investigating the sea chests tomorrow. Shawn said what he'd said to Gus.

"I'm taking them with me, if they want to come along. I know Sean's doing something in LA on Friday, but that gives us Wednesday and Thursday to stagger around town. I gotta take them to the Breezeway Bakery. And they want to see where I work. The idea of See-an on a horse, though—well, it tickles my funny bone." He felt Lassie's fingers twiddle against his ribs, and jerked away from the torture. The two winced playfully at one another. "If we didn't have somewhere to be, I'd be chasing you around the house right about now. Revenge is my sweet mistress."

"It'll be a few days before we can do something like that."

"I know. I'm sorry about the polo match."

"That's not your fault. I could've taken the day off, too. But I didn't."

"But you didn't." Shawn poked him in the belly. "Fine, it's your fault we didn't have better sex on our anniversary. I tried to allocate blame fairly, but no, you wouldn't have it. I concede."

"I love it when you talk like a grownup."

"Gus and you both hurl excessively at my Socratic irony. So every once in a while, I do try to act like the kid who was nearly class valedictorian. Alas, that was many years and many hours of _Beavis and Butthead_ ago." He spit out toothpaste, rinsed, and grabbed Carlton for a very involved kiss before leaving the steamy bathroom.

Carlton tugged on clean trousers, his former clean trousers now wrinkling like a raisin on the bedroom floor. His shirt, however, was in pristine condition. Wearing non-work attire in public still felt weird to him, such as his current shirt with a tiny knit collar and short sleeves—very odd. Even Shawn had donned a nicer shirt in order to impress their affluent guests. Though Carlton worked every strand of his hair to a shape of absolute precision, Shawn left his hair wet with a bit of gel in it. It wouldn't matter: Shawn's hair would obey the will of its master to look both messy and fetching. Annoyingly so. Shawn had always had the wondrous ability to look ready to go while simultaneously appearing as if he'd just rolled out of bed. At least Shawn was showing that he cared to make a decent impression on the Laramies.

At the airport, they parked then waited in the baggage claim, a building that resembled a high-quality carport. Minutes after the arrival of the Laramies' flight from L.A., Shawn saw the buff, big-shouldered Sean Laramie enter—alone.

Shawn squeezed him tight, as if knowing that there was a reason he should dish extra affection to his visiting friend. When Sean had hugged Carlton, he looked at the two of them and felt his face heating up again.

"He's not coming," Sean started, then paused to catch his words before they wandered off again. "Jason, I mean. He's not coming. We had a fight this morning. So—here I am. I still have that screen test in L.A. Friday—and I didn't know how to tell you he wasn't coming, and I kept hoping he'd change his mind and show up in time for the flight—but that didn't happen, so—so—"

Shawn dragged him out of the depths of mindless rambling and heartbreak. "It'll be fine. I promise. It'll be fine." Because intuition, whatever he had of it, told him that Sean and Jason couldn't break up. They couldn't. It went against everything in the cosmos. Jason had to show up and make everything better.

Carlton patted Sean on the back. "Let's get your suitcases and get you home. You're probably more tired than you think."

It was an accurate assessment on Lassie's part. Sean was asleep in the guest room forty minutes later, after a cup of tea, the necessary sympathy, and a hot shower.

In their room, Carlton was endeavoring to read a new book about Lincoln, and Shawn was endeavoring to go over his plans for tomorrow, while taking notes on his next astrology article. A large portion of his creative laziness wanted to fill it up with breakup bullshit, because that's where his mind kept going. Sean and Jason, fighting so awfully that they would treat each other so disrespectfully. The look on Sean's face—

Shawn slammed his notebook shut and slithered into the sheets. "What do you think, Pooch?"

"I think I'm not sure I like this book yet. Seems to be written by an author with the intelligence of a sixth-grader. Or do you mean about Sean and Jason? Or you going out amongst the masses tomorrow with Gus, just like old times?"

"Both. Wait, no. Make that all three. Honestly, though, I'm not all that interested in what you're reading. Do you think we should call Jason?"

"It's probably better not to stick our oars in."

"You have better uses for your oar. I could email him."

"If you have to do something, my dear, I condone the use of email—if you twist my arm. It seems personal but not as imposing as a phone call. But I still don't think you should do anything. It's their fight."

"What if it were us? Fighting like that? Wouldn't you expect Juliet and Gus to impose on our behalf?"

"Yeah, but it's all moot, isn't it? We don't really fight. We disagree. I always say I'm sorry. So do you, when you're actually the one to blame—which, sadly, isn't often the case."

That was true. Their arguments, brief and heated as they were, often were the result of an action or careless phrase of Carlton's. Shawn fought for the sake of having a fight. He needed to yell once in a while, so did Carlton. It got the tension out that sex, alone-time, stress and work couldn't—and sometimes created. Sean hadn't put forth a lot of details on his and Jason's fight, merely saying it'd been coming for weeks and that they were not surprised by it. Shawn and Carlton understood. Their fights came like that, too. Shawn had tried once to find some celestial connection to it, but it was really no more than the ebb and flow of emotional tides. Nothing accounted for it.

"They do have funky Mars placements," Shawn said, snuggling up to Lassie's hip and curving his arm around Lassie's thigh. "I remember looking that up once."

Carlton chuckled, finally bookmarking his spot in the lame tome. "You and your astrology, always hilarious. For someone who doesn't believe in ghosts, you put a lot of stock in planets that don't even impact Earth."

Shawn's brow wrinkled. "Who says I don't believe in ghosts?"

"Uh, you do!" He clicked off the reading light and turned to grasp Shawn's hands. He made them clap together limply. "You, Shawn, don't believe in ghosts." But he quit clowning around when Shawn's silence morphed into a deep, untouchable thing. The pain was so intense and so eerie that Carlton wanted it to go away. "What, you do now?" He tried to laugh, but it was flat, deadening into awkwardness. "Shawn?"

"It's nothing." Shawn tucked his head under Lassie's chin. "Just that sometime I think the Hayworths are running around Santa B as ghostly apparitions. Stalking my footsteps. Pissed that I couldn't solve their case and nearly got myself killed in the process."

Or had gotten himself killed. He'd stopped breathing. His heart had quit beating. By the grace and willpower of some otherworldly being, he'd breathed again and his heart had started again. He'd believed in ghosts ever since.

He couldn't quite tell this to anyone. Not Gus. Not Lassie. Not even his therapist. Maybe the Hayworths really _were _following him.

This didn't tell him what he should do about Sean and Jason, though. With Carlton snoozing on his shoulder, Shawn stared into the ceiling, dappled by the neighbors' lights through the trees and mini-blinds. He had to think about this.

By midnight, Shawn was asleep, and Carlton was in the living room with Shawn's laptop, typing a short email to Jason Laramie.


	5. Chapter 5

There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel,  
and the deader the corpse the better.

**S.S. Van Dine  
**_20 Rules for Writing Detective Stories_, ca. 1928

5.

In the morning, Carlton was unsuccessful at waking Shawn.

Well, waking him, yes. Getting him out of bed? No.

Carlton saw Shawn's writing paraphernalia littering the bistro table in the dining room, and figured Shawn must've gotten up and worked on an article. As usual, most of the notes were in a smattering of languages, most not English. Shawn preferred three languages that began with S: Swedish, Spanish and Slovak. The Swedish he'd learned while working under a team of ecologists in Canada in 1998. Shawn had been their assistant and had learned more Swedish than ecology. The Spanish was just sort of natural to him. The Slovak came from his stint in a Slovakian restaurant in Washington, circa 2000.

Shawn knew other languages, too, but those, along with ASL, were his three favorites, the three he used the most. Carlton had caught Shawn talking to himself in ASL, as if he couldn't help doing it. And one time, that'd happened while they were having lunch together at the station. Chief Vick saw the two of them exchanging signs, Carlton knowing only the primitive basics—enough to say "I don't know." Vick had asked Shawn to crime scenes mainly as an ASL interpreter. They had one on retainer, of course, but even he had to take vacations, and speaking Spanish was more common among the PD than ASL.

Shawn's brain amazed Carlton. So did Shawn's ability to sleep after a long night of writing. He tried again to get Shawn out of bed, leaving a hard smack on Shawn's butt, lessened in severity by a few layers of covers.

"I have to go to work," Carlton said, riling Shawn at the shoulder. Sleepy brown eyes finally reached his, a minuscule comprehension alive in them. "There he is. Good morning, sleepy head. Did you hear me? I have to go to work. Don't forget that you have company, and Gus is coming for you later. I set the coffee to brew in thirty minutes. It's half-caf. Should be enough to get you going."

Shawn grabbed the end of Lassie's tie. "Hang on, sugar cake."

It was a continuous game between them that Shawn's pet names be ever so much cuter and workable than Carlton's pet names for Shawn. Calling Shawn sweetheart seemed off somehow. And the grabbing-the-tie thing, Shawn had been doing that to flirt with Carlton for what seemed like eons.

Shawn managed to stick a couple of fingers between Lassie's shirt buttons, getting a feel for the cotton tee underneath. "You still meeting us for a late lunch?" His voice was thick out of his scratchy throat. The coffee would probably help.

"As far as I know. Cafe Del Sol. Two o' clock. I won't forget."

"Better not."

"I won't."

"I'm going to call you at one-forty-five just be sure."

"You won't have to. I'll beat you there."

Shawn tugged at the tie again, bringing them closer together. "I kinda love you, Lass."

"I more than kinda love you. Have fun with Gus and Sean today. I'm sure you'll find what you're looking for."

"Right," croaked Shawn. He wasn't quite as convinced as Lassie seemed to be. But he looped his arms around Carlton's neck before sending him off to the frequently dull world of policing. He received a much more perverse smack on the butt as Carlton walked out.

Lethargic, Shawn pottered around the house, slurping coffee and reading. Eventually, the guest room door opened, showing Sean the house in daylight. He'd seen photos of the new paint and decor in emails Shawn sent—he wasn't much of a social media person after his hospital stay. Sean liked the bright colors: "Very not like Carlton at all. Very like you, though."

His smiles were painful to look at. Shawn could see the agony in him.

"Don't you and Jason fight a lot? About little stuff?"

"We rarely fight," Sean answered, filling a mug of black single-source coffee. "That's why it's worse when we do."

Gus's arrival brought a needed supply of energy, almost of the celebratory variety. Shawn, as soon as his brain had been in working order, had sent Gus a message saying that Jason hadn't come and not to be surprised when he got at the house. Consequently, Gus overcompensated in his joy of seeing Sean again. Sean was a bit special to Gus, too, being the first case he'd helped Shawn solve—sorta—after marrying Juliet. Practically while marrying Juliet. Though what Gus actually remembered from that time was telling Shawn to kiss Lassiter and get it over with, not really so much with the case. But it was all a matter of personal perspective. Gus still felt like he and Shawn had solved it together—or, rather, the answer had more or less popped out of the ether and out of Shawn's mouth.

Sean and Jason Laramie had been together for years, and it was odd to see one without the other. Gus did his best, but he soon saw that Sean was a little too distracted to pour his wounded heart into the vacation.

Shawn planned a little breakfast on the patio. He was getting good at hosting get-togethers, the more spontaneous the better. He threw together (literally) a cassoulet with diced ham, green onions and broccoli. While it baked and whetted their appetites with its odor, they sat in the morning sunlight and talked about their plans. Sean was enthused by the idea of tagging along while they investigated a mysterious sea chest. He was intrigued by the stories Gus and Shawn told about their childhood meeting with identical chests. Shawn told him about the second one, using more detail than he'd given Gus ages ago.

"You never told me that was Lassiter!" Gus burst out saying.

"Yes, I'm sure I did."

"You did not. I never knew it was Lassiter who'd let you look at both of them! Those chests! Shawn, you told me it was Dobson! Now why would you lie about something like that?"

Sean was good at picking up on people's reasons. Perhaps it was the actor in him, always vigilant of the reactions of others, always wanting to know what they were doing and why they were doing it. "Maybe he liked Lassiter then and didn't want you seeing into him."

Gus huffed, feeling exposed and angry about it. "I wouldn't have judged you," he said softly to Shawn.

"I didn't _like _Lassiter then—but there was something about him, something about that time. I can't quite put my finger on it. And I didn't mean to lie to you, buddy." He clapped Gus on the shoulder. "All these years, I really thought I'd told you it was Lassiter who'd let me into the Unknown Room, and the Unknown Room in the Unknown Room. Forgive me?"

It was easy to forgive Shawn. Sometimes Shawn really did have the memory of Dorrie in _Finding Nemo_. Amazing what people wanted to remember, opposed to what had actually taken place. He'd been through something like that with Juliet just the other day. Unfortunately, when he tried to tell the tale to Sean and Shawn, it was only funny to him. His frequent pauses to cackle at himself left Sean and Shawn regarding one another, embarrassed for him.

After the meal, and with Sean away for a minute, Shawn confessed to Gus that he'd sent Jason an email.

"Shawn, what do we always tell you about interfering?"

"I'm guessing 'Do it as often as you can, Shawn, because you're so good at it' didn't make that list?"

"You know better. It's Sean's and Jason's fight. Not yours."

"Yeah, but when you say it like that, it sounds like I _should _be involved. My name's Shawn, too."

Gus let this go. He couldn't really argue against it. Curiosity and hope overcame him. "Well, since it's done, did Jason email you back?"

Shawn checked email on his phone, but shook his head. "Not yet. He might've emailed Lassie back, though."

Gus gave a Huh? Face.

"I'm pretty sure Lassie emailed Jason, too. Oh, hey, the Reds won last night. Padres lost. Juliet will be disappointed."

"Juliet says that the Padres are digging themselves into a hole and they're not going to make the post-season now. And how'd you get me to stop reprimanding you?"

"Because I'm clever, and that's what clever people do. And I mentioned your wife. It always distracts you."

"I should try it on you sometime."

"Neither mentioning Juliet nor my wife will help. I'm too used to Juliet, and I don't have a wife."

"You should _get _one. Why won't you marry Lassiter?"

"You know my reasons."

"I really don't. Neither does Jules. She thinks it has something to do with you having been shot."

"She can say that, if it makes her feel better. Mets won. So did Toronto. H'mm, didn't see that one coming. All these seasons later, and I'm still not sure how I feel about interleague play. Does it really _do _anything for the League?"

Gus grew frustrated at Shawn's unwillingness to discuss it. Shawn played it cool whenever Gus mentioned one of two things: marrying Lassiter, and the reasons Shawn wouldn't marry him—and that usually involved mentioning the multiple gunshots Shawn had miraculously survived. Gus was still sorry he hadn't been there, and still sorry that Juliet had been part of the first team to show up. She'd been the one who'd put a bullet in Waylon Scobie. From what Gus had managed to squeeze out of his wife, Shawn was already unconscious when she took out Scobie. The whole saga had remained convoluted, and, the least-favorite word in police lexicon, unsolved. No one had been able to determine why Scobie had gone after Shawn. If Shawn knew, it was his secret. Gus understood Shawn's silence.

Often, Gus used the "Why don't you marry Lassiter" card as a means of teasing Shawn. Only in the last couple of weeks did Gus seriously wonder if Shawn refrained from matrimony because of the shooting, and not for, as he used to say scoffingly, political reasons.

Returning to his friends on the patio, Sean wasn't subjected to the sensation that they'd been talking about him. He was glad for it. In private, he expected Gus and Shawn to whisper about his intense fight with Jason. If Gus and Shawn did engage in that kind of talk, they'd would never show it. It was a relief to be there with a distracting activity planned. The sea chest sounded Scooby-Doo worthy. The last time Sean had been in a mystery, there'd been a script and rehearsals, an actor played the villain. Prior to that, his poor old self had been saved from felony charges by Shawn. Knocking on a lady's door and asking to see an antique sea chest seemed way less stressful.

-x-

"It isn't here," Mrs. Glass informed a party of three very handsome men just entering the prime of their lives, and, luckily for her, the front hall of her dashing house. "As much as it pains me to say no to you, Shawn Spencer, and dear Mr. Guster, I'm afraid the trunk's not currently in my possession—technically speaking."

The fact that it wasn't there stung. It stung less because Mrs. Glass, like many in Santa Barbara who followed such goings-on, was a fan of Shawn's and Gus's. And, not withholding any judgement of herself and ample free time, she was more than a little intimidated by Sean Laramie. He was far more good-looking in person than he was on television. Shorter, though that didn't bother her. She appreciated short men. They always felt like they had to compensate for it. Shame about the gay thing—and the wedding ring. He would've made a nice memory to have in her collection.

Shawn was immediately aware of Mrs. Glass'—how could he put it?—vixenish qualities? Mad cougar skills? Rapacious need for sexual gratification? Then again, the moon _was _nearly full, and that was inclined to make people friskier than usual. In Mrs. Glass' case, however, Shawn was unwilling to admit this was Mrs. Glass friskier than usual. And that was rather creepy. He tried not to be repulsed, only grateful that he had someone at home, and it was no longer required that he stare at people like they were screwable pieces of meat. Eek. Had he ever been like that? No; he'd met toasters more likable than some people.

His mind took a zipline back to the missing trunk. "Do you know where it is, Mrs. Glass? It's important that we find it. We're trying to attach some history to it. A—you know—what's that thing called—when you have a piece of paper that tells you where an antique came from and—"

"It's called provenance, Shawn," said Gus. He was perfectly aware that Shawn knew the word. Who stayed at home all day and watched _Antique Roadshow_ reruns on Ovation? Shawn did. But it was nice of Shawn to give him an in. "Forgive us for barging in here like this, Mrs Glass," he used his smoothest, butteriest voice, "but we are looking into the provenance of the chest for a client of ours."

"I'll save you the trouble of asking," Mrs. Glass said. She wished she'd take them up on her offer of sitting down and sipping mimosas, but sipped hers alone. "I don't have any provenance papers on that trunk, delightful as it is. I bought it at a yard sale years ago. I hardly thought the thing a worthwhile antique. Can I ask, who's looking for it?"

"We can't tell you that," Shawn said. "Not without the permission of our client."

Sean played along. "I'm their client." His arms folded, muscles bulging. Many a charming quadragenarian had ogled him in a fashion quite like Mrs Glass exhibited then. He was used to being a favorite among her age group, and, oddly, of her socioeconomic standing. It was always the rich and bored one had to look out for. "I was thinking of adding it to my own collection. I have a couple of trunks from the early part of the twentieth century, and even a portmanteau from the Twenties with a provenance that links it to William Carlos Williams." He could just about hear Shawn's and Gus's heads whirling. "If you're willing to sell your item, Mrs. G, I'd be an interested buyer."

Bothered to be softened by Mr. Laramie's suaveness, and his delicious bedroom eyes that'd seduced many a woman on _Gotham Splendor_, Mrs. Glass kept her outward cool. "If you can find any provenance for it, Mr. Laramie, I'd be happy to entertain your offers. If, on the other hand, you cannot provide any decent authenticity regarding its magnificent origins, then I will take no less than five hundred for it. If, as you say, you wish to add it to your reservoir."

Sean, after glancing at Shawn, agreed to the deal.

Shawn clapped his hands. "Bu-ut, we still have to find the darn thing, don't we, guys?" He gave his best fake-laugh. "Yes, we do! So! Let's get on that! Where'd you put it, Mrs. Glass? And you don't have to show off your inviolate Scorpio side to me. I can see right through you."

"Of course you can, dear," Mrs. Glass responded. How'd he know she was a Scorpio if he wasn't psychic in some way? With a pad and pencil taken from the telephone table, also covered in little old antiques, she wrote out an address, but gave her telephone number directly to Sean Laramie. "I sent the chest off for reconditioning. My friend Homer has it. You can see the chest at his place. Then, if your search ends fruitlessly, I'll be happy to see you again, Mr. Laramie. I'd be happy to see you in either case." She spoke next to Mr. Spencer. "If you can't find Homer at that address, that means he's gone off to that damn house to do some work today. He does that whenever he has a free hour or two. You'll probably find him there."

Shawn's lungs tightened. A tingle shot up and down his spin. The hairs along his forearms stood on end. "The—which house? The—not the—the _Hayworth _house." Unable to breathe a second ago, he could now feel himself—literally feel himself—turning green. He already knew they wouldn't find Homer the handyman at his regular address. They'd find him at the Hayworth house.

"Someone has to mow the grass at that damn place," Mrs. Glass said, herding the striking trio of masculinity toward the door. "Homer's father used to be their groundskeeper, so he thinks he owes it to them. Not that anyone _pays _him, mind. He does it because he can't help himself. Well, happy sea-chest hunting, boys. I look forward to another visit from you. Especially you, Mr. Laramie. Make it at a time when you can stay for lunch. I do enjoy watching handsome men enjoy wonderful food."

Shawn was a mixed bag of emotions, many of them fairly rotten ones. Gus made sure that Shawn was capable of reaching the car. He seemed to be walking sufficiently enough, but he was still pretty pale, and, uncharacteristically of Shawn, his hands shook all the way up to his elbows. Gus got him into the front seat of the car. He and Sean stood off to the side, discussing possibilities.

"Think we should call Lassiter?" Sean inquired, not sure what else could be done.

"No, don't think so. In about five minutes, Shawn's going to be really mad at Lassiter. He just doesn't know _why _yet."

"I don't even know why." Sean waited as long as he could. Gus avoided eye contact. "Are you going to tell me?"

Gus tugged at Laramie's arm, inching them even further away from Shawn. He lowered his voice as low as it could possibly go, the ultimate Limbo Voice. As soon as he explained it to Sean, there was a concession between them. Lassiter should definitely not be telephoned.

Gus, kneeling by Shawn in front of the open car door, asked what he wanted to do. "You want to go and find Homer and that sea chest, or do you—"

"It's better if we just go to that house."

"Are you sure? You hate the Hayworths."

Shawn's look was potent, his decision unalterable. "But I can't get away from them, either. Let's just get it over with. I'd have to go eventually. Might as well be now. And I don't hate the Hayworths. What's to hate? They're all dead."

That was an inarguable statement. Back in the car, Gus tried to work out on his phone how to get there. It was the sort of place one knew, one drove by every once in a while, but, when actually trying to figure out how to get there, the mind was too challenged. "I don't know the address. I'm having a hard time finding it."

"It's twenty-two, fifty-one Nova Place." Shawn sighed. "I saw it enough when I was up to my eyebrows in research. And you tend to remember the address of the place where somebody shot you. Repeatedly. Until you— Never mind. Just drive, Gus."

Gus put the phone aside. This was one of the few times Shawn had ever mentioned it, and Gus didn't know if it was an opening he should take, or if he should let it lie. Maybe letting it lie was better. As soon as Shawn put everything together, which, eventually, he would, he was going to be too pissed at the rest of them to think straight. And they were going to be sorry. Really sorry. How were they to know the sea chest would lead them back to the Hayworths, the one thing they were trying to so hard to get Shawn away from? Maybe Shawn was right, and he couldn't get away from the Hayworths.

Thankfully, Sean knew what was going on now, and, what was more, he had Lassiter's phone number. He was also in the back seat of Gus's still new-smelling Chevy Spark, unseen by Shawn. He sent his thumbs to work typing off a message to Lassiter. Lassiter's response might've been predictable to anyone who knew the situation, whether or not he was a psychic.

"Shit. I'll meet you there."

That was reassuring.

But Lassiter didn't quite get there to _meet_ them. Instead, they pulled up to the front gate of the Hayworth mansion. Gus parked the vehicle they called the Strawberry, for its slightly pinkish-red coat, and everyone managed to roll out of their seats onto the steep incline of drive in the mansion's bumpy shadow. It was made of dark gray stone, with dark tiled roofs even gargoyles at the corners. It was a gothic castle, horrid and frightening and disturbingly beautiful.

"Do you suppose Edward Scissorhands is at home?" Sean joked.

"If I see Danny Elfman anywhere around here playing a violin and looking creepy, I'm leaving. I mean that," said Gus, feeling a little sweaty in his shoes, always a sign that something was wrong. "I think we should forget about this, Shawn, and get out of here. I really doubt anyone's home."

Now that he was there, Shawn didn't mind so much. A morbid fascination touched him as he saw the front door hanging open a good three inches. "Someone's been here."

"Yeah, the crew that came to clean up your blood." Gus said it without thinking of the consequences. He winced and whimpered when Shawn hit him with an expression of anguish and anger, a rare sight. "Sorry, I didn't mean, I—" Gus faltered, having no choice but to follow Shawn and Sean up the flight of shallow stone steps to the double front doors of deep orange-red. "It was a scary time for me, too. Please tell me we're not going inside."

"Dude, I'm _totally_ going inside," Shawn replied, eerily upbeat. His cheerfulness was ripped apart as his fingertips pushed the door in and scattered the numerous pigeons using the foyer as a roost. He shied back, waiting for the birds to calm and the feathers to stop flying.

"That place is full of bird poo," Gus said. "I'm not going in there. It's disgusting."

"At least it's not my blood," returned Shawn, feeling satisfied with so witty a riposte that had to do with his own bodily fluids. His three bold steps landed him inside. It did stink, but the smell wouldn't stop him. If anything did, it'd have to be something worse than piles of guano.

Something crunched under his shoe. He paused, deciding it couldn't be that awful.

"Owl pellets," he whispered to Gus and Sean. Then shrugged. "Still, not my blood, and that makes me happy." He brought out his phone, screen alight with a solid white glow to illuminate their surroundings. There wasn't much to see. "It was more exciting before."

Gus and Sean also had their phones out. All three screens lit the place well. The closest windows were in the parlor, up a step and more than sixty feet away, on the north side of the mansion. They passed the wide staircase. Gus commented that it still looked stable enough to hold somebody. "Not me," he said, "just somebody stupid enough to climb them." He jumped when Shawn started shouting.

"Hello! Homer! Are you here? My name is Shawn Spencer! With me is my associate, Harry Cox!"

Sean let out a huge laugh, making the pigeons restless again.

Gus was less than pleased. "Like I've never heard that one before."

Shawn went on talking to the shadows and the pigeons. "We just came from Mrs. Glass's! Not Missus Glasses! I mean we came from seeing Mrs. Glass! We were at the house of Mrs. Glass! That's what I mean!"

"I told you, Shawn: S-apostrophe. Why can't you remember everything?"

"I'm not a human Rolodex, Gus. And I don't think Homer the handyman is here."

"The lack of response must've been your first clue."

"I mean, surely he would've come for someone named Harry Cox. Am I right? Well, we've made it this far. Wanna be greater than Chester Copperpot? Then let's look around some more. It's strange being here again. I only saw the police photos of the scene."

"You actually looked at those?" Gus was disappointed, and a smidgen frightened for Shawn's sake. Gus had vowed he'd never look at them. "Lassiter was supposed to have those locked into the archives to keep you from snooping."

"He's my soul mate, Gus. You think he can hide much from me? He's terrible at hiding Christmas and birthday presents. How's he going to hide the file of my attempted murder? I want to go out back for a sec. Just want to see if it's true that they really had an oleander tree. Seems I vaguely recall that from when I was here before, but, I—I can't be sure."

His energy was starting to slip a little. Putting on a brave face in front of Sean and Gus was one thing, but feeling the atrocity of standing in that place again was something he had to do for himself. As far as his friends and family knew, he'd been _saved _there. As Shawn saw it, he'd _died _there. That tended to change a person's perspective.

Up in the raised parlor, Shawn paused on his way to the back entrance to the garden. The phone's screen had gone out, leaving only the eerie light of the dirty windows to radiate the shapes of his friends.

"Do you guys hear something?"

"Yeah," Sean said, "like running water."

"Sounds like," Gus paused, "a creek or a fountain or something."

Shawn sucked in a startled breath, having it hit him. "There's a fountain in the back."

He ran to the door, shoulder pounding against it to pop it out of the tight frame. The force sent him shooting forward through the suddenly open door and into the yard. Gus and Sean came up quickly from behind. Shawn came to an abrupt stop. The fountain was in his line of sight. Near it stood a lanky and attractive gentleman—Carlton. But there was anomalous pale thing hanging out of the fountain's bottom pool. It bobbed weightlessly as the shallow waves hit it. A four-foot cascade dribbled across the torso of a corpse.

"You three stay there!" Lassiter commanded. He needed the coroner, a forensics unit, and he needed someone to get Shawn far, far away from the Hayworth mansion.

Shawn's gaze was fixed on the body. Only one sentence seemed to circle in his thoughts. "This time, that's not me."


	6. Chapter 6

No willful tricks or deceptions  
may be placed on the reader  
other than those played legitimately  
by the criminal on the detective himself.  
**- S.S. Van Dine  
**_20 Rules for Writing Detective Stories_, ca. 1928

-x-

6.

Shawn had made it to his favorite place in the SBPD station: the often unused video room. It was dark, had a big table, comfortable chairs, and was probably the only room in the building that didn't contain a nasty odor of moldy mop or damp socks. His head was comfortably at rest on the crook of his arm. He was as boneless and relaxed as he could be. His mind, on the other hand, kept up a constant rotation of thoughts.

He was in such a catatonic state that he didn't even raise his eyes when the room to the video door opened and closed. Knowing the sound of his father's walk, Shawn remained motionless, hopeful to disqualify himself from holding any sort of conversation with his dad. Not really what he wanted right then.

Something slid across the table and hit him lightly in the arm.

"I brought you some tea."

"Yeah, because that'll make everything better."

Henry had learned to decipher Shawn's muffled speech decades ago. Affectionately, he ruffled up the hair on the back of his boy's head. "Come on, it's not that bad. They were just trying to help. How were they supposed to know it'd lead back to the Hayworths?"

"Because everything in my life leads back to the Hayworths." Now Shawn lifted his head, lolling it around, wincing at the dull pains pulsating around his eyes. Dad looked pretty awful, too. "Were you in on it?"

Henry said nothing, but he wasn't so good at hiding guilt from Shawn.

"Dad, seriously? You too? Was the whole department in on it? 'I know, let's get Shawn Spencer out of his retirement and make him chase that old sea chest!'" He jumped from the chair, skidding it across the floor. Once up, he paced angrily back and forth, trying to reason it out in his mind. "Why didn't everyone else just mind their own business? I was fine before—fine not working cases and doing something else with my life."

"But you're missing the point," Henry argued. "The point is that Lassiter still found that third trunk. And you _were _right al those years ago, Shawn. There _were _three. And at first Lassiter couldn't believe you were right. He told me about it and the whole thing just sort of snowballed from there. You just picked a shit day to see Mrs. Glass about it, that's all."

Shawn stared at him—hard. Henry felt miniature daggers surging through the shield over his feelings. He was disappointed in himself.

"All right. No. Lassiter and I did not do our due diligence when we set this whole thing up. We didn't check to see if Mrs. Glass and her creepy, mousy groundskeeper had a connection to the Hayworths. Why in a million years would we think of that? All the Hayworths are, as you know, dead. If they're not dead, they don't live in Santa Barbara anymore—and that's a fact, Shawn. We just thought we were doing what was best for you. It backfired. Don't be pissed at Lassiter for it. Or me, for that matter, but I'd take the blame for Carlton. He really had no idea. None of us did."

Shawn supposed that was true. The sting of the situation, the helplessness of it, hadn't left him. The coating over his father's often fumbled words were toxically sweet. Shawn fidgeted, looking at the ground. "I want to talk to Carlton. Could you ask him to come in?"

Henry nodded, not adding a word. He got up, patted Shawn on the shoulder, and took off into the precincts open area of detective desks. Lassiter was sharpening pencils. Trying to keep his thoughts occupied the last twenty minutes had been fairly difficult. Downright challenging, in fact. No, worse than that: impossible. A glaze of hope crossed him as he noticed Henry's approach.

"Shawn will see you in his office," Henry quipped, adding a sardonic smirk.

Shawn didn't call the video room his office, but he did often refer to it as a tree house. It had a lot of wood, and a kind of elemental feeling about it. Twice, Carlton rapped knuckles on the shut door, then was hailed to enter. Standing in the middle of the crowded room, Carlton found Shawn irritated and tense—not that he'd been expecting something else.

"Sit," Shawn commanded, kicking the leg of the nearest chair.

Carlton sat, rearranging his tie nervously. The intensity of the silence burned his heart. "Shawn? I want you to know how sorry I am."

Shawn's annoyance wasn't easily absolved. "I know you're sorry," he said, tone flat with anger. "What you did was hurtful and embarrassing to me, and I know you're smart enough to know that. And you also know that I'm not going to forget about it and forgive you right away. It was an elaborate plan, Lass, I'll give you that."

"But not elaborate enough. I didn't know about Homer's father working for them, that it would lead you—" He quit talking while Shawn waved him to silence.

"I didn't expect you to know that. I'm not angry at you about that. It's the embarrassment factor, actually. And sorta-kinda the lie factor. And it was elaborate. I mean, you did have to find a way for me to get to notice the trunk in the first place. Right? Getting me to look in a magazine that I've never opened before—that takes intelligence and a little bit of mischievousness."

"That was Gus's idea." Should that disassociate him with it even slightly. The way Shawn seethed, the only thing that'd help Carlton out of the doghouse was time—and plenty of it. All the sudden, Carlton knew what he'd done, how awfully he'd behaved in Shawn's eyes. "I belittled your life, didn't I? I made it seem like what you're doing now isn't important."

Shawn endured the weight of tears hitting the back of his eyes. It was a relief to hear Carlton say so. "Yes," he mumbled, nodding. "You did do that. Not just you. Everyone else, too." He let Carlton take a hold of his arms and press them together, just for a second before he pulled away. "I respect your work and everything you do. I even like the way you double knot the garbage bags when you gather trash on Sunday nights. I even like the way you almost constantly ask if I'm okay when I get to breathing so hard when we're in bed. I even like the way you tell me not to eat the chicken marsala on my plate because it might be too hot and I'll burn my tongue. These are the little ways you respect me and look out for me. This was wrong, and you knew it when you did it."

Carlton's face was beet red. He wasn't sure if he was going to throw up or cry. One or the other would have to happen as soon as Shawn dismissed him—which was sure to happen any second. "I am sorry that I—"

"But," Shawn clipped the word, making Carlton shut up, "I am glad you were there this morning. I should've—I don't know—shouldn't have gone except that I felt like I had to go." Shawn saw Carlton wanting to sweep him into his arms. He quickly caused a detour by holding up a palm. "I haven't forgiven you. I just understand where you're coming from. It'll take me a while to forget this happened, if I ever do. And it'll take you a good long while," he inhaled and let it out as he talked, "to respect my life as it is now, little and insignificant and different as it might be."

"I don't think your life is little, Shawn."

"But?"

"But I miss having you bug me at work sometimes, all right? I liked your hair-brained ideas, the way you solved things with thoughts and concepts I can't even grasp. You were good at it. You're good at the other stuff, too. No one can bullshit his way through an astrology forecast with your level of sensitivity and humor—" Carlton sighed, returning to the maudlin. "But you were good at this, too. I wanted you to remember that."

He tapped Shawn's cheek, the one turned toward him, and left a kiss there. He walked out, hoping he'd reached Shawn in a way that would tighten their bond rather than pull them further apart.

Shawn returned to the seat he'd vacated. His legs had refused to hold him up another second. That talk hadn't gone very well.

He sipped the tea his father had brought him. Was there a way out of this? And who was the corpse? What was her story?

Lassiter hadn't been sitting in his desk more than fifteen seconds before the great bodily giant known as McNab appeared. Pained and almost flinching, Lassiter took in McNab's sympathy—and his relayed request.

"Chief wants to see you." He watched the detective throw a palm across his haggard face. This wasn't going to get easier. "It's probably about Shawn more than the dead woman. Haven't gotten an I.D. on her yet."

Lassiter took a second to speak his mind. When he did, he was direct and to the point. "It's really unsettling that half this police station constantly interferes with my relationship with Shawn."

"Well, we're just your big fat annoying extended police family."

"That makes me John Corbett," Lassiter mumbled. He straightened a little, able to live with that.

"And Shawn's Nia Vardalos. Without the puffy white dress. And no cousins named Nick. Don't feel too bad, Detective. All of us here like the two of you together. It makes us happy. You'd better take this." He dished a folder to Lassiter. "It's just some follow-up that we finished at the mansion. Hey, how'd you know to go to the back of the house before the front of the house? Gus said that they didn't see you until they saw you at the fountain."

Sometimes listening to McNab, or anyone in the building, was like listening to a comedy sketch show while under the influence of a massive sleep deprivation. Carlton thought he might've decoded McNab's question. "I heard the fountain. I knew the house was closed up, so I figured someone had been there, or was there, messing around. Actually," he shrugged mildly, almost ashamed to admit it, "I thought Shawn might've done something, maybe turned the fountain on."

"He does get himself into a lot of pickles. Big jars of pickles," assessed McNab. "Chief's waiting," he muttered, taking off.

In the chief's office, Carlton wisely shut the door behind him—softly. He didn't need to attract more attention to himself. But he got it: Vick stood up behind her desk, a sure sign that anger simmered beneath the surface.

"Sit." Vick directed him to a chair.

Immediately enswathed in deja vu, Carlton executed the command. On his lap, the crisp new folder. He cleared his throat as he opened it.

"I have a few theories about this, Chief, and I—"

"Save your theories until we know who she is. I'm having Dobson run through Missing Persons now. We'll find her." Karen slipped into her own seat, sure that Lassiter knew he hadn't been called in solely because of the body in the fountain. Unable to imagine what had exactly occurred between Shawn and her best detective, she was nonetheless interested. "What did Shawn say when he found out?"

Carlton inhaled, heart thumping. "Everything I thought he'd say when I was planning the thing. Do you think I'm an idiot?"

Karen waited. Was he asking her, or was he repeating his conversation with Shawn?

"Well, I'm not an idiot," continued Carlton. "I knew he would find out what I'd done, that I'd planned the whole thing—more or less. But I didn't expect the Hayworths to come into it, and I didn't expect that Shawn would go back to that house."

Karen grimaced for his sake, for her own when she realized the heightened level of her confusion. So, it was true that Lassiter did know Shawn better than anyone else. Who would've doubted it? Even Gus had thought Shawn wouldn't find out that nearly everyone in the police department knew of Lassiter's plan to raise Shawn's sagging interest in crime-solving. None of that helped her. "But what did Shawn _say_?"

"That I lied to him and embarrassed him, belittled his life. Which is true. I did. I owned up to it. Maybe that's good enough. Maybe it's not. Do you want me on this case, Chief, or don't you?"

Falling back into her role, Vick waved a hand at him. "I haven't made a decision yet. It'll be you or Arlette, I guess. I don't want O'Hara working on it. She has as many bad associations with that house as Shawn."

Carlton tightened his mouth. True, O'Hara _had _shot Scobie just after Scobie had tried shooting Shawn to death. O'Hara had succeeded. Gladly, Scobie hadn't. Carlton hadn't seen Shawn until he was at the hospital, the second he was rushed in. "Good decision, Chief, regarding O'Hara. She's having a hard time with that armed robbery, anyway. I might take McNab on this one, unless you protest."

"Why McNab? You can't stand him."

An irrefutable observation. But who could Carlton really stand, except O'Hara? "Because he wants to take his exam again and he could use the work. Plus, his family's been around this town for ages. He knows a thing or two about the Hayworth place."

It was clear that Karen didn't believe McNab capable of such a thing.

"No, really. Watch." Carlton held up a finger, turned his head and yelled into the bowels of the building. "MCNAB! GET IN HERE!"

He barreled into the office five seconds later, eager to be of use.

"Tell our esteemed chief what year the Hayworth house was built."

"Eighteen ninety-eight." McNab didn't flub or hesitate. "Although that was really the _second _house, the first one having been built in 1873 and burned to smithereens. Many a local historian will gladly tell you that the house was set on fire by a mad servant they had working for them at the time. But that story was never actually proved, and there's no record of the Hayworths even keeping servants until the second house was built, as I said, twenty-five years after the first one. Between Seventy-three and Ninety-eight, the family spent a lot of their time traveling through Europe, though they kept a smaller house on Nova Place. Construction for their new house started in 1890. There were a lot of delays and changes before it was finished, and the family moved in sometime in May of 1898."

Vick rubbed an ache out of her temple, eyes momentarily closed. "How do you know all of this, McNab?"

"I read a lot of Shawn's notes. The ones he took before he got—er—shot. And, also, my cousin wrote a book about a lot of the local historic homes here in town. She's really into architectural history. And, you know, I have a theory—"

"The chief doesn't want our theories until we know who the victim is." Lassiter filled him in, and he quieted. It sorta made sense to them.

But Vick was curious. She hoped Dobson soon had the woman identified. It'd make everyone's day a little better. Probably not Shawn's, though. "You'd better take Shawn home," she said to Carlton. "I'm sure he's had enough excitement for one day, and something tells me he won't be interested in this case. You can go home yourself, if you want."

"I'll call you when the vic's I.D. comes in," McNab offered to his superior officer. Shawn really should go home. Lassiter, too.

"I'm not sure he'll let me take him home," Carlton admitted. Though not quite ready to try his luck with Shawn, he gave his compatriots nods of gratefulness, for their sympathy, their understanding—and for being his big fat annoying extended police family.

Lassiter bypassed asking Shawn if he wanted to go home. Instead, he relegated the duty to Shawn's father. Seemed far more painless that way.

Henry griped about it, and wasn't above mentioning his reasons for disliking the idea. "You're a wuss sometimes, Lassiter. You gotta have more backbone to deal with Shawn. I'm _not _taking him home. _You _do it."

So far, it was the closest Henry had come to saying what he'd thought for two years, that Shawn and Carlton were a damn fine couple, as long as they stood up for one another. Even their fights were short, brief and ridiculous. This, though, was certainly important and significant. It couldn't be ignored and forgotten after a few hours, or smoothed by a few solemn apologies.

Taking umbrage at Henry's insightful quip, Carlton returned to the video room. He knew that the best way to deal with Shawn then would be to _command _him. There was no _asking _to take him home. There'd be a direct order.

"I'm taking you home," he said as soon as he was inside. It'd gone unnoticed that Shawn was on the phone. Shawn made a gesture for him to wait, a sign that Carlton took as favorable. Shawn couldn't stay angry at him forever… It was _almost _all right if Shawn stayed angry an hour or two. Carlton would've been.

Off the phone, Shawn passed the pertinent information along to Carlton, though the heat of frustration continued to color the tips of his ears. "That was Sean. His room at the hotel is ready, so he's taking his stuff over there. Before you ask how he's doing that, I'll tell you: his rental car. We're going to hang out later. What'd you say you wanted? To take me home?"

Carlton refused to entertain one iota of jealousy regarding Shawn's relationship with a hunky actor. For one thing, Sean was married. Shawn would've been married by then if he'd just said yes. Carlton's brow took on a twitch. Stress was flung at him from all directions. He hated bickering with Shawn; this was no minimal dispute, either. Unfortunately. He hated having Jane Does on slabs in Woody's office, too. "Um—yes, I'm taking you home."

So the afternoon lunch at Cafe Del Sol was off, then. Okay. Shawn could deal with that, but it didn't help get the point across to anyone. "I'm really all right." Maybe less all right than he'd let on the last hour, sure, but everyone stretches the truth once in a while. If ever he needed to, now was one of those times. "I'm more upset about it for Sean's sake than mine."

The pun was irresistible. "And I'm more upset it for my Shawn's sake than Sean's sake."

Shawn didn't find this so funny that he busted a gut laughing. A smirk touched his mouth and that was all. Out of the chair abruptly, scooting it back in place—he tried to leave the video room as tidy as he'd found it—Shawn permitted Lassie to take him home. Before Sean stopped by, some alone-time would provide time to write down his thoughts, digest what he'd seen and what'd happened.

But on their way out, in front of the Administration desk, Lassiter's pocket blurted, and he took a call he related to Shawn thirty seconds later. He didn't tell Shawn who'd called. "I have a stop to make on the way."

The stop was the county coroner's office. Shawn insisted that a wait in the car was fine with him. Watching Lassie disappear behind the dark glass doors, Shawn's interest escalated. Either Woody, with Dobson's research expertise, had found the woman's identity already, or it was something else far more powerful than a name.

Woody brightened at Shawn Spencer's unhurried, nearly cautious entry into the bowels of the small office. "Ah! There he is! There he is," Woody repeated, wrapping blue-gloved hands around Shawn and pressing him into the white lapels of his lab coat, thankfully clean. "Aw, our boy's found his way back to the dead and those who can't speak for themselves! I've missed you, Spencer the Younger. I really have."

Shawn tapped Woody's elbows, hoping to be let go soon. Really soon. Like, three seconds ago. Was Woody smelling his hair?

"That's our Shawn! Same old greasy coconut smell, like cooking spray," Woody commented about Shawn's hair-scent. He turned back to Detective Lassiter, grinning in his unnerving way. "I do so love it when the kids smell like kids."

Carlton tried to reach for Shawn's arm, but Shawn took a full step to the side. Shawn: 3. Carlton: 0.

"I sensed that I should be here for this." Shawn's voice was moody and soft, and most of it wasn't acting. "Something about the fountain water, Woody? What's up with the fountain water?"

"Right you are, my heroic, super-powered friend." Woody held up a phial of somewhat clear liquid.

"It looks like water," Carlton said, grumpier than usual.

Woody wasn't immune to the tensions that lovers' spats created, and Shawn and Carlton were in the middle of a doozy. "I see that the two of you are going through an ordeal, more personal than not—am I right? So I'll make this quick and let you get back to ironing out your issues."

Neither Carlton nor Shawn wanted to say anything.

"Does _everyone _know our business?"

By not acknowledging it, Shawn devalued Carlton's facetious question. Instead, perhaps to pique Lassie's aggravation, Shawn rooted around in his repertoire of expressions for one that was both accepting and hurtful. "Thanks, Woody. Lassie and I appreciate your understanding. Tell me, what do you do when your wife gets you to do something through an artful lie?"

Woody's smile was flat, humorless. Was that what'd happened? Leave it to Lassiter… But Woody supposed even psychics like Shawn couldn't see every wall they were about to hit. "If that happens, and it rarely has—though one time she got me to go to a nude beach in Greece, only it turned out to not be a nude beach—it was a lot like that episode of The Golden Girls when they found themselves—" Wait, what was Shawn's original question? "If she lies to me, I see how clever it was, appreciate her for that, then I make her mow the grass. She _hates _mowing the grass."

That was no good. Lassie already mowed the grass—and took out the garbage. Shawn supposed he could make Lassie do his own laundry for the next month. Lassie _hated _doing the laundry. Antithetically, Shawn loved it. Throw it in the washer, leave it. Throw it into the dryer, leave it. And everything came out so fluffy and warm and clean! No, Shawn would _miss _doing the laundry for four straight weeks. He could just make Lassie iron his shirts. That was a bigger torture. And they could bond whenever Shawn applied dollops of Neosporin to Lassie's tiny iron burns.

Carlton wouldn't let Shawn think about this longer than necessary. "What about the fountain water, Woody?"

"Oh! Right! Sorry, I just get so involved in the lives of my coworkers. It's like a reality TV show around here. So—fountain water. Right. Well, here's a big secret: It's _not _fountain water."

Shawn had anticipated this. "Is it seawater?"

"Winner, winner, chicken dinner, Mr. Spencer! It's just old-fashioned seawater, bits of kelp in it." He held up a plastic slide with the bits of kelp on it. "Kelp's native, from around here. So, when she drowned it was in shallow seawater somewhere along our wonderful coastline. But that's only one of three different ways she could've died."

It was worthwhile to see the looks on Lassiter's and Shawn's faces. Even Lassiter's ears seemed to droop right along with his jaw.

"What?"

"One of three?" repeated Shawn.

"One of three," Woody said for the second time. He showed examples on the body. "See these? Abrasions. I didn't find any debris in them, thanks to the water. I'm not sure what they're from. Could be wood. Could be rocks. But from the work of the Crime Scene Unit, it doesn't look like she was killed at the mansion."

CSU hadn't recovered any new blood at the house. Carlton's jaw tightened for a moment. "What's option three?"

"Oh," Woody had almost forgotten, "heart attack, actually. She had quite the weak ticker. She was in the process of having a fairly fatal heart attack when she was killed. I haven't heard from Officer Dobson yet about the identity of the woman. But she's between thirty and forty-five. No distinguishing marks. Probably has a kid or two out there."

Shawn's heart went cold. A mother. That figured.

Woody droned on to what he believed was a receptive audience. "At least one. Tailbone's had a minor fracture, usually a common affliction for women during the birth of live young. Only in humans, though. We're the only species illy adapted for giving birth. Well, the women of our species are. Men, definitely not. There is that story of the transgender man who gave birth to his own children. Absolutely fascinating."

Shawn wanted Woody to stop talking, but his thoughts toiled around seawater. "Anything else, Woody?"

"—she told me a tall tale once of a fisherman who'd given birth to baby lobsters but I—what? Oh, no, that's pretty much all that's interesting. Time of death is somewhere between five a.m. and seven a.m. this morning. And she did have a few body piercings. And I said 'did have' for a reason: they've closed up, and some have left scars. I didn't know what the scars were at first, because they were on her areolae and—wow!—who'd want piercings there, huh?" Woody rubbed his own nipples through his clothes, sympathetic to their sensitivity. "And also one in her upper pinna," he pinched his own upper right pinna to demonstrate, "and one in her nose. But, like I said, they've been closed up for years. Looks like someone in the post-Grunge era that might've come to regret her wild side."

"Post-Grunge era," Lassiter said, feeling around for conclusions, "that'd be the middle-late Nineties, wouldn't it? So she could be," he glanced at the handsome man next to him, "Shawn's age."

Woody calculated this. "I don't know. Can't say I know how old you are, Spencer the Younger." He threw his common affability into the statement.

It should be illegal for someone to be that cheery at work, Shawn thought. "I knew plenty of people around that time who got piercings and lived to regret it, sure."

Woody grimaced and patted his beloved nipples again. "Yeah, I can see why."

A fuzzy stare of Shawn's landed on the sheet covering the body. Without thinking, and moving too swiftly for Lassie or Woody to stop him, Shawn whipped back sheet's hem and revealed her face. He didn't know her. For a second, he wondered if it could've been an old classmate, if it was true that she was close to his age and, presumably, local. But he didn't know her. Somehow, that made it less weird. But he looked at her again, the shape of her chin, the roundness of her nose. She wasn't familiar, but pieces of her—a curve, a wrinkle in her bottom lip—were familiar. Shawn slid the sheet back into place.

"What is it?" Lassiter asked him.

"I don't know yet."

Phone ringing, Lassiter lifted it from hiding and gave the caller a grumpy greeting. Shawn heard a thanks, the brush of cloth as Carlton returned the phone to his pocket.

"Dobson. They think they've identified her."

Shawn noticed Carlton was far more perplexed and bothered than he'd been a minute ago. Might be someone they knew, after all. But, oddly, her name was not the first question Shawn asked. "How'd they I.D. her?"

"Her husband came into the shop and reported her missing. McNab and Kennedy are bringing him over now."

"They don't have to—"

"I know that," Carlton said, fuse to his short temper burning quickly. "I know he doesn't have to come in to see the body to identify it. But he _wants _to see it. Let's get out of here. I still have to take you home. And Woody's office is not exactly spacious."

"Yeah," Woody said, not offended by the observation. "I wish there was a way I could open it up a bit more in here. I'd love to a have a sofa, and possibly a wet bar. Well, thanks for dropping by, kids. The next time I see you, I hope you'll be in love again."

Carlton rubbed the annoyance out of his face, and Shawn's neck throbbed with the heat of humiliation and anguish.

"Oh, wait, that reminds me. I got you something." Back in his office, Woody found the present and returned to them promptly. He gave to Lassiter an elegantly wrapped box, flat and small. "Happy anniversary, you two crazy lovebirds."

No one had given them anything, which was probably Shawn's fault—at least as Shawn saw it. He'd been too busy insisting that everyone help pull off the Pony at the Station prank that he'd used up their time and their goodwill, and they had nothing left to think of something as trite as a present.

"Open it now," Woody urged, excited as a child. "If you don't like it, I can use it and I'll get you something else."

Carlton, without looking once at Shawn, ripped off the paper enough that he could wrestle the lid free. The bow, with its still-sticky tape, he pushed against Shawn's shoulder. It stayed until Shawn immediately removed it. It was going to be a long day. Just hoping it wasn't anything too embarrassing, Carlton found a gift certificate inside.

"One of those trail-riding places out north of Santa Ynez," Woody clarified, still thrilled to give them something they could use happily. "You know, where you rent the horses and you go around in the mountains for an hour or two. Thought you'd like it. Or—maybe you can take your own horses." He didn't really know how Shawn and Carlton's horse usage worked, knowing enough that they rode and liked horses. "Enjoy!"

On their way out, Carlton wanted to say something profound and meaningful to Shawn, but could think of nothing. Shawn wanted to continue saying nothing. It comforted him the most. None of that awkward need to apologize, say he was sorry for expecting too much…

Shawn paid attention again when Kennedy and McNab appeared, escorting their visitor. Shawn caught the man's eye, then looked away hastily. But he turn his head around for a final glance at the man. The whole exchange haunted Shawn.

In Lassiter's car, their present from Woody on his lap, Shawn went over what he'd learned of the victim. This was easier to assess than his antagonistic, seemingly unending episode with Lassie.

"I think I should make you iron your own shirts for a month," Shawn blurted out.

Carlton accepted this. "I can do that."

There—argument done.

And yet—no. Not really done.

Parked in the carport of home, the engine still running and their seat belts still fastened, Lassiter answered the phone, putting it on speaker.

"Hey, Detective, this is Officer Dobson."

"What is it?"

"It's about the Jane Doe. Her husband—uh, Zack Ingelow—identified her as his wife of twelve years, Anabel Ingelow."

"All right, thanks, Dobson. Gather the information you can and question him."

"You don't—" Dobson restarted, voice thinned by excitement and wonder. "You don't recognize the name. Detective, she was born Anabel Grayson. She's Officer Grayson's daughter."

Lassiter leaned into the seat, turning white. "Crap."


End file.
